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the-daily-tizzy · 3 years

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Men, like nations, think they’re eternal. What man in his 20s or 30s doesn’t believe, at least subconsciously, that he’ll live forever? In the springtime of youth, an endless summer beckons. As you pass 70, it’s harder to hide from reality. Nations also have seasons: Imagine a Roman of the 2nd century contemplating an empire that stretched from Britain to the Near East, thinking: This will endure forever.

Forever was about 500 years, give or take. France was pivotal in the 17th and 18th centuries; now the land of Charles Martel is on its way to becoming part of the Muslim ummah. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sun never set on the British empire; now Albion exists in perpetual twilight. Its 95-year-old sovereign is a fitting symbol for a nation in terminal decline. In the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to buy the world. Business schools taught Japanese management techniques. Today, its birth rate is so low and its population aging so rapidly that an industry has sprung up to remove the remains of elderly Japanese who die alone. I was born in 1942, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century – the American century. America’s prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the ‘Greatest Generation,’ we won a World War fought throughout most of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed. It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity. We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia and fought international terrorism. We rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world. We built skyscrapers and rockets to the moon. We conquered Polio and now COVID. We explored the mysteries of the Universe and the wonders of DNA…the blueprint of life. But where is the glory that once was Rome? America has moved from a relatively free economy to socialism – which has worked so well NOWHERE in the world. We’ve gone from a republican government guided by a constitution to a regime of revolving elites. We have less freedom with each passing year. Like a signpost to the coming reign of terror, the cancel culture is everywhere. We’ve traded the American Revolution for the Cultural Revolution. The pathetic creature in the White House is an empty vessel filled by his handlers. At the G-7 Summit, ‘Dr. Jill’ had to lead him like a child. In 1961, when we were young and vigorous, our leader was too. Now a feeble nation is technically led by the oldest man to ever serve in the presidency. We can’t defend our borders, our history (including monuments to past greatness), or our streets. Our cities have become anarchist playgrounds. We are a nation of dependents, mendicants, and misplaced charity. Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels. The president of the United States can’t even quote the beginning of the Declaration of Independence (‘You know — The Thing’) correctly. Ivy League graduates routinely fail history tests that 5th graders could pass a generation ago. Crime rates soar and we blame the 2nd Amendment and slash police budgets. Our culture is certifiably insane. Men who think they’re women. People who fight racism by seeking to convince members of one race that they’re inherently evil, and others that they are perpetual victims. A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale said she fantasizes about ‘unloading a revolver into the head of any white person.’ We slaughter the unborn in the name of freedom, while our birth rate dips lower year by year. Our national debt is so high that we can no longer even pretend that we will repay it one day. It’s a $28-trillion monument to our improvidence and refusal to confront reality. Our ‘entertainment’ is sadistic, nihilistic, and as enduring as a candy bar wrapper thrown in the trash. Our music is noise that spans the spectrum from annoying to repulsive. Patriotism is called insurrection, treason celebrated, and perversion sanctified. A man in blue gets less respect than a man in a dress. We’re asking soldiers to fight for a nation our leaders no longer believe in. How meekly most of us submitted to Fauci-ism (the regime of face masks, lockdowns, and hand sanitizers) shows the impending death of the American spirit. How do nations slip from greatness to obscurity? • Fighting endless wars they can’t or won’t win

• Accumulating massive debt far beyond their ability to repay

• Refusing to guard their borders, allowing the nation to be inundated by an alien horde

• Surrendering control of their cities to mob rule

• Allowing indoctrination of the young

• Moving from a republican form of government to an oligarchy

• Losing national identity

• Indulging indolence

• Abandoning faith and family – the bulwarks of social order. In America, every one of these symptoms is pronounced, indicating an advanced stage of the disease. Even if the cause seems hopeless, do we not have an obligation to those who sacrificed so much to give us what we had? I’m surrounded by ghosts urging me on:

• the Union soldiers who held Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg,

• the battered bastards of Bastogne,

• those who served in the cold hell of Korea,

• the guys who went to the jungles of Southeast Asia and came home to be reviled or neglected. This is the nation that took in my immigrant grandparents, whose uniform my father and most of my uncles wore in the Second World War. I don’t want to imagine a world without America, even though it becomes increasingly likely. During Britain’s darkest hour, when its professional army was trapped at Dunkirk and a German invasion seemed imminent, Churchill reminded his countrymen, ‘Nations that go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.’ The same might be said of causes. If we let America slip through our fingers, if we lose without a fight, what will posterity say of us? While the prognosis is far from good, only God knows if America’s day in the sun is over.

~~~

from an uncredited Facebook page ||Author unknown

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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Hi there, I really liked what you had to say about the upcoming election. I was wondering if you have published any articles recently in regards to that? I know you said you were a historian.

Aha, thank you so much, this is very flattering. Alas (?), the book that I have just published is about the crusades, as I am a medieval historian by training. However, one of my main research interests is the role of the “imagined medieval” in modern culture, I have written a book chapter about the role of the crusades in post-9/11 political and cultural rhetoric, and I am developing a research project that examines the current crisis of public history through a medievalist perspective. That, however, is still in draft stages.

That said, I absolutely DO have a mini reading list for you (and a lecture to go with it, because as noted, I am an academic and this is how we function!) The topic of today’s class is “Why Accelerationist Ideology Is And Always Has Been Horrifically Racist and Genocidal Throughout History, and White Americans Only Like It Because They Don’t Live In Countries Where It Was Done (By America).” Not very snappy, but there you have it.

The reading list, to start off, is:

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow

The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia by Michael Sells

These are all hefty books (though the Maddow and Sells books are shorter) but they’re accessible and written for the layperson, and we always have time to educate ourselves. Why are they relevant to the 2020 election, you might ask?

First: the Cold War book lays out in great, GREAT detail the consequences of a global world order absolutely gripped by a competing standoff of ideologies (American capitalism vs. Soviet socialism) and how these two forces gulped up the politics of the rest of the world, destroyed numerous satellite states, and tried to rebuild them from the ashes into new ideological utopias -- precisely what a lot of people are suggesting now with the ridiculous “just burn everything down and it will magically fix itself!” theory that is somehow presented as the Moral Alternative to voting for Biden/Harris. You know what this caused during the Cold War? Yep. Human suffering on a massive scale, and absolutely zero utopian perfect states, whether capitalist or socialist. It also makes the extremely salient point that in the 1930s, German leftists and liberal democrats were infighting among themselves as to who was Less Morally Pure, and couldn’t agree on a candidate or a moral imperative to oppose the other guy, and figured that their flawed liberal idealists were “just as bad” as said other guy. Was that guy’s name Adolf Hitler? Why yes. Yes it was. Is there a lesson here for us? Who can say. Seems hard to figure.

Leaving aside the tragedy and pointlessness of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, both fought as proxy battlefields between Americans and Soviets, let’s consider the Great Leap Forward, in China (1958-1962) under Chairman Mao Zhedong. The idea was to dismantle traditionalist Confucian Chinese society and rebuild it as a modern socialist state, which was the goal of a lot of twentieth-century old-school socialist/Marxist “people’s republics.” Mao took this exact “burn conservative society down and rebuild it according to Enlightened Leftist Principles” approach and it was... a disaster. A total and epic disaster that caused both short and long-term suffering to the Chinese people and, wouldn’t you know it, did not result in a utopian Chinese state. This is also the reason you cannot say anything complimentary about Fidel Castro, especially if you want to win Florida, no matter how “good” you think his socialist principles were in the abstract, because: Cubans and Cuban-Americans fuggin’ hated the guy. You know why? Because he also destroyed their lives.

Obviously, there is a ton of distance between old-school Communism in the 20th century and 21st-century modern democratic socialism such as that run in Norway (and the Scandinavian countries in general), no matter if your racist uncle on Facebook insists on conflating the two and howling about the Red Menace like it’s still 1962. But the point is that radical leftist accelerationist theory hasn’t changed from 1962 (or frankly, from Karl Marx) either. It still figures that by some miraculous principle, the entrenched systems and ideologies will either just disappear or be “torn down,” the Peasants will Rise Up and Overthrow the Aristocracy, and something something socialist utopia. Except that was tried multiple times in the 20th century and it always failed. More than that, even if it was supposedly “leftist,” it inflicted just as much suffering on its own people as fascist right-wing dictatorships. Americans have always been infused with the triumphalist confidence that they “won” the Cold War because socialism was bad, and it was the inherent flaws in socialism as a world order that doomed it to defeat, unlike rah-rah Red White and Blue American Capitalism. So capitalism, ignoring its own fatal flaws, went hog-wild in the 80s and 90s, establishing Reaganite deregulation as the core and unimpeachable tenet of the market, and we’re all living in the increasing wreckage of that economic system now. Obviously the right wing uses “socialism” as a bugaboo to scare us that Things Could Be Worse, but I haven’t seen the faintest trace of historical context or awareness from the particularly deluded breed of hard leftists who still cling onto the magical theory that a Perfect People’s Uprising Will Fix Everything.

On that note, let’s move to Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine lays out in similar excruciating detail how the U.S. systematically destroyed the economic systems of countries particularly in Asia and Latin America (and the entire shameful history of Uncle Sam in Latin America should be required reading for EVERYONE) and sold them a bill of goods about “free market economics” in the Keynesian model. Guess what resulted from this attempt to destroy entrenched societies overnight and rebuild them in the name of Ideology? If you guessed “massive human suffering and ongoing generational devastation and dysfunction” you’d be right again! This was accompanied with constant political interference from the CIA and the State Department to support right-wing dictators and military takeovers in a way that have left the politics and institutions of Central America in permanently broken disarray, because it turns out it’s a lot easier to keep exploiting those brown people in governmental systems that don’t allow dissent or democracy, no matter the exalted principles you like to preach about Freedom and Liberty. The U.S. likes to act as if the Central American refugee crisis is this unwarranted invasion of these dirty immigrants, as if it didn’t play a DIRECT AND LONG LASTING EFFECT in destroying the infrastructure of these countries to the point where they’ve become incapable of functioning as healthy democracies. If you think “banana republic” is the name of an upscale clothing store, I beg you, research the history of that term.

This hasn’t even gotten to the absolutely horrible history of Africa’s treatment at the hands of white Europeans (see the Kendi book for obvious anti-racism education and also how those racist ideas are directly built into the ideological infrastructure of America). Somehow white leftists, while professing to be allies of Black Lives Matter and proclaiming themselves Woke, have managed to overlook this, and I don’t know how??? (Answer: it’s racism Jan.) First it was the transatlantic slave trade and the large-scale kidnapping, sale, and chattel bondage of generations of people. Then it was 19th-century colonialism and imperialism, where Europe thought it could “civilize” the “Dark Continent” and rebuild it to an “enlightened standard.” This was not a right-wing project; this was solidly mainstream and it was enthusiastically advocated by many liberals and intellectuals who busily composed an entire academic and “scientific” literature to support it. Did the European wholescale destruction of traditional societies in an attempt to build a Perfect Ideological Utopia result in... massive human suffering, by any chance? Leopold II of Belgium might have something to say about that. Then when an overstretched Europe was finally forced out of its overseas colonies in the aftermath of World War II, guess what resulted? Did African society spring from the ashes and remake itself in a perfect image? Nope! It became subject to decades-long civil wars and bloody military dictators because its infrastructure had been so crippled (very deliberately so) by its departing colonialist overlords that it likewise had no sustainable model for development. It turns out when you break things out of the idea that they’ll magically fix themselves, they just stay broken and they get worse. Now we once more have the West acting like Africa is a hotbed of Primitives while ignoring its own role in destroying it (and the situation in the Middle East, but that’s a whole OTHER can of worms! So many cans! So many!)

The Peter Frankopan book is an excellent exploration into the flourishing medieval trade networks across the East, the function of the Silk Road in bringing culture and commodities across the known world, and how Europe’s intervention and eventual ascendancy was marked by profound violence, the destruction of these networks, and the outright pillage of non-white people and riches. Which we know, but... read it. Europe and its heir (America) started the crusades, colonialism, imperialism, two world wars, and other conflicts that always contained a virulent aspect of spreading Ideology and getting people to Believe The Right Thing. These cumulative conflicts have devastated the planet repeatedly and we are still feeling their effects right up to this minute. They were all connected to Establishing Supreme Ideology and Supreme Whiteness (and Supreme Christianity). I’m detecting a pattern. The Rachel Maddow book explores how from the 1980s onward, America went absolutely hog-wild with the military/military ideology as a central way to solve its problems, which was tied to the Cold War, capitalism, and extreme individualism. All of which are tied to our current mess today.

Obviously, the most extreme examples of putting ideology above people result in outright holocausts, which is why you should read the Michael Sells book about Bosnia. Everyone knows about the WWII Holocaust of the Jews (and we have already seen how that is busily being denied along with the return of anti-Semitism, which never goes away), but the Bosnian holocaust was happening while most of us were alive. The West deliberately ignored it, because it was framed as the “last crusade” against Muslims in Europe and they needed to be removed in order to create a Pure Christian Europe; hence the Bosniaks were apparently an acceptable sacrifice in achieving this. I have some words on my tongue, I think they start with “massive human suffering,” and how that is constantly what results when an existing society, no matter how flawed, is attacked by ideological zealots who see huge amounts of death as an acceptable price to pay for their brave new world, as long as it’s not theirs (and sometimes even when it is). In fact, the accelerationist theory of social change is so profoundly racial and genocidal (and is indeed being used in exactly that way by the neo-Nazis and white paramilitary elements today) that it’s even more shocking to see supposedly progressive and moral people advocating so enthusiastically for it. It is a white supremacist Nazi wet dream of an ideology in which all the “flawed” people just vanish (spoiler alert, they don’t vanish, they are brutally murdered or allowed to die from deliberate and arrogant negligence) and the Aryans cavort in paradise. Just replacing that with some socialist jargon buzzwords doesn’t change the underlying framework.

And this is STILL NOT GETTING to America’s own history, and you know, the fact that this continent was occupied when white settlers arrived, declared it “terra nulla” or “empty land,” and set about slaughtering the existing advanced civilizations and their people in the name of! You guessed it! SUPERIOR IDEOLOGY! Funnily enough, destroying the Native Americans “for their own good” didn’t result in utopia for them. It resulted in.... yeah, I think we get it by now, but just in case, one more time: MASSIVE HUMAN SUFFERING.

Tl;dr: The accelerationist theory of social change (just destroy everything and it will magically rebuild according to our preferred ideology) is a racist and genocidal fantasy of orgiastic destruction that has caused untold damage throughout history. White Americans whether on the right or left are fond of it, because they have never lived in a country where this has been repeatedly and horribly done to them (often by America itself) and which has cost uncountable Black, brown, Muslim, Jewish, Latin American, Native American, etc lives. The deliberate or deliberately negligent destruction of society does not lead to regeneration. It leads to long-term and unfixable damage, and the people who profit the most from deliberate disaster are the capitalist corporate overlords that the left professes to hate. This country is a racist garbage fire and nobody denies that it needs to change or die, but buying into this theory about how you should just stand back and let it burn/obstruct efforts to work within the system and mitigate the damage IS BULLSHIT and RESULTS IN MASSIVE HUMAN SUFFERING AND DEATH. Which, so far as I know, wasn’t supposed to be a progressive value, but hey, I could be mistaken.

Learn some history. Wear a mask.

Don’t be a whiny pissbaby that makes the rest of us die.

Vote Joe Biden and Kamala Harris 2020.

#history #american history #history of racism #politics for ts #long post #anonymous #ask

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itsmassivecollectionpatrolus · 3 years

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Life under Fire: The Wages of Apostasy

(Presented at the Eleventh IHR Conference, October 1992.)

Thank you, United States, for letting me come and speak. I mean that seriously because the fight is now getting quite creepy. For two years now, in country after country, I have been conducting this international Campaign for Real History. During this period, in country after country, I’ve come up against an international campaign against real history — an international campaign full of lies, an international campaign to suppress the truth. The truth of this campaign is quite clearly something that I had previously not wanted to believe: there is, in fact, an international force out there with an influence that transcs frontiers. Day after day, country after country, month after month, I come up against this international force.

In my apartment in London, I’ve accordingly opened a file titled “Jewish Harassment.” This should not be taken to mean, in the slightest, that I am anti-Jewish, because I’m not. The fact that many Jews are anti-Irving does not mean to say that I am anti-Jewish. There’s no paradox in that statement. Week after week, month after month, they are causing me immense harassment, embarrassment and distress. But journalists come to me, again and again, and ask me: “Mr. Irving, are you anti-Semitic?” And I reply, “Not yet.”

For two years now, I have been the target of this worldwide campaign — in Germany, France, Spain, South Africa, the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and England. Let me tell you a little about what has been happening in some of these countries.

In Germany, I’m now technically a prohibited person. I can’t go there because the German authorities have ordained that David Irving shall no longer cross their frontier. A free democracy, and yet that’s the only way they can fight against me: by forbidding me to come in. That edict was issued in March 1990. But since then, I’ve been in and out of Germany 60 times. I’m not going to tell you how I’ve done it — but there are ways of doing it.

In Austria, there’s an arrest warrant out against me, but no entry prohibition (whereas in Germany there’s the entry prohibition but no arrest warrant). So between the two of them you can find a way of getting in. As I said to the Germans the last time I spoke to a mass meeting of 7,000 people in Passau: there are enough people here in plain clothes taking notes for the Ministry of the Interior, and tonight they’ll be asked: how did he get in again? To this I can only say: “Go ask your colleagues in Austria how David Irving got in this time.”

Banned in South Africa

Besides Germany and Austria, officially I am not permitted to get into Italy or South Africa. Last January and February, I spoke for two months in South Africa, this time visiting 15 towns and cities. Two weeks after I returned to England, a letter arrived from the South African government in Pretoria. It told me: “Mr. Irving, as an Englishman you normally do not require a visa to enter South African territories. For you we are going to make an exception.” I reported this ban to the South African newspapers, which discovered in a matter of days that this unique embargo was being placed on me by the South African government at the request of South African Jewish organizations. This was followed by an outcry by other South Africans who wanted to hear me on radio and television, and in person. It was another encroachment on freedom of speech.

Of course, I am able to come and speak here in the United States because you have something very important, your First Ammendment guaranteeing freedom of speech. It is very unlikely, I think, that the United States government would actually stoop to trying to prevent me from coming here to speak. It would be a very, very serious day indeed if that should happen.

In Canada, I have a big speaking tour lined up that is due to start on October the 26th. Yesterday, here in this very hotel [in Irvine, Califronia], I was handed an express letter from the Canadian government informing me that I would not be allowed to enter Canada. Once again, pressure has been exerted by these international groups to keep me from speaking. In this case it was the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, but the reason given me was this: “Mr. Irving, under the immigration act, a person is not permitted to enter if he has committed a criminal offense in another country, or if he is likely to commit a criminal offense in Canada. We may consider you likely to commit a criminal offense.”

After receiving this, I straight away instructed my attorney in Canada to point out that I’ve been to Canada some 30 times since 1965, and not once have I committed a criminal offense. So, prima facie, I am unlikely to commit a criminal offense on the 31st occasion. [On October 26, Irving legally entered Canada. He was illegally arrested — after lecturing on freedom of speech — at Victoria, B.C., and deported on November 13 after a three week court battle. He is appealing.]

Detention in Rome

In June of this year, I went to Italy. I arrived in Rome, after a stop in Munich, from Moscow, where I had been working for two weeks in the former Soviet government’s secret state archives. As I got off the plane in Rome, six Carabinieri police cars were waiting for me at the airfield, and as I got into the airport bus, the police stormed the bus, rifles drawn, and called out my name, “Mr. Irving.” Ladies and gentlemen, now that’s embarrassing! Under the circumstances, I tried to make it look as if this was my VIP escort!

They held me there in the police station at Rome’s airport for four hours until the plane turned round and flew back to Munich. And half way through, they let in the Italian student who had arrived to meet me there. (I had been invited by a university professor.)

During the police interrogation, I “hadn’t understood” a word of Italian, and I made them speak English to me. But when the students came in, I spoke with them in Italian, explaining how sorry I was. Seeing this, the police colonel became very indignant and said: “Silenzio, Don’t Speak.” So I said, “Where does it say that I can’t speak?” He repeated, “Silenzio, Don’t-a speaka.” And I repeated: “Excuse me, but nowhere do I see a sign that says Silenzio.” At that, he seized a thick felt- tip pen, and in a blind, Italian temper he went to the magnificently painted wall inside this beautiful, brand new police station, saying “You can’t-a see-a? Here!,” and wrote the letters S I L E N Z I O on the wall, and then shouted: “Silenzio!”

Last October [1991], I spoke in Argentina. On the morning of the first day, I took part in a two-hour television program. (I also speak Spanish.) I was on with a man named Maurizio Maro, but whose real name turned out to be Goldfarb. If only they had told me beforehand! But too late.

Goldfarb asked me questions like: “But Adolf Hitler, he was crazy wasn’t he?” And I said: “No, he wasn’t.” “But of course he was crazy,” he retorted. I responded by saying:

There’s no evidence for that at all. The evidence is that we — the British and Americans — captured seven of Hitler’s doctors. We interrogated all seven of them on that specific point: Hitler’s own physicians were asked if they considered him clinically sane or out of his mind. All of them came to the conclusion that, even until the very last moments of his life, he was totally sane. And not only that, I have personally found Hitler’s medical diaries — the diaries kept by his doctor, Theodor Morrell, which I found in the archives in Washington, DC. After transcribing them, I published them. These diaries also confirm, without a doubt at all, that Hitler was perfectly sane and physically normal.

Now considerably agitated, Goldfarb responded: “But the man must be totally crazy because he killed forty million human beings.” The first time he threw out this figure, I let it pass, but the second time round, I stopped him, saying: “Forty million? Excuse me, where does this figure come from then?” Goldfarb then said: “A person who kills even one man is a criminal.” In this case, then, I said, President Bush is a major criminal because of the damage he did in the Gulf War this very February.

At this point, the interview was dramatically cut short. And the very next day, all the other interviews that had been lined up by my publisher in Argentina were cancelled. Newspaper and television interviews, and a Belgrano University appearance — all were cancelled. It was an object lesson on the influence that certain people have. The day after that (October 18, 1991), a major daily newspaper, La Nación, published a communique issued by Argentina’s Jewish governing agency, with a headline calling me an “International Agitator.” Well, I’m sorry that the Jews get so easily agitated. But it’s not my fault. My job is to go there and lecture on the historical truth as I see it.

The Right to be Wrong

I admit that we may be wrong. Each of us in this room may be wrong on this or that matter. But I demand the Right to be Wrong! That is the essence of freedom of speech in any country.

No one is going to define for us what the received version of history is or should be. But that is what they are trying to do now in Germany, and all around the world.

Every other aspect of world history is open to debate and dispute — except one. Anyone who challenges this one aspect of history is automatically, ipso facto, described as an anti-Semite. Jewish leaders are now saying that anyone who questions any aspect of the Holocaust is an anti-Semite. Of course, that’s not true. We are just lovers of the truth, and determined to get to the bottom of what actually did and did not happen.

I do not insist that what I tell you here today is necessarily the only version of the truth, and that thou shalt have no other truth than this. I’m not as arrogant as that. I do say that this is the best that I can do, given limited resources, and against the harassment that I’ve come up against in the last few years.

That harassment has gotten worse and worse, particularly with the recent Focal Point publication of the new edition of Hitler’s War. This new edition contains material never seen before. If you want to see a photograph showing what it looks like when 17,500 people are killed in 30 minutes, here it is. Everyone’s heard about Hiroshima and Dresden, but no one knows about what happened in Pforzheim, a small German town in Baden-Württemberg, where one person in four was killed in the most horrible manner in mid-February 1945. We have photos of that crime. I’ve shown this photograph to audience after audience.

On the previous page of Hitler’s War are the well-known photographs of Dresden, where a hundred thousand people were killed in a period of twelve hours by the British and Americans. So many were killed so quickly that there weren’t enough living left to bury the dead. So the corpses had to be burned on these huge funeral pyres in the Dresden Altmarkt. I published the photographs in 1963 in my first book, The Destruction of Dresden and, now, in Hitler’s War, I publish them for the first time in color.

Window Smashing

There are 60 color photographs in this book, a work that no other publisher could have published so lavishly. Of course, our traditional enemies are absolutely livid because of this book, which is very sought-after in Britain. We published it ourselves, and personally delivered 5,000 copies to 800 book shops up and down the country and around the world.

Our traditional enemies have been fighting back. Their local cells, branches and agents have been visiting — patiently and methodically, one by one — every book shop that stocked this book, demanding that it be “un-stocked.” Because most book shop managers are not open to intimidation in the way newspapers are, they get their windows smashed. As result, there’s been a campaign of window smashing throughout Britain during the last three or four months.

During the night, the big plate-glass windows of the book stores are smashed, and the next morning the stores receive a letter on letterhead of the local synagogue, or the local Jewish Board of Deputies. The letters say “we are very sorry that your windows were smashed, but what can you expect? We promise that if you stop stocking David Irving’s books, you will find that this kind of problem ceases.”

This campaign — smashing the windows of book stores, big and small, including chain book stores in Britain such as Waterstone’s and Dillon’s — has been reported in all the local newspapers. I subscribe to a press clipping service, so I get all these clippings. But there’s been nothing in the British national newspapers.

And why not? Well, the answer is that these wondered where these journalists come from, these spineless, nasty little creeps such as Bernard Levin of The Times of London.

I am philosophical about newspapers. I remember one Monday morning ten years ago when my secretary came to me, saying: “David, how can you stand for it? Have you read what they’ve written about you yesterday in the Sunday Times? It’s only a short thing, but you now might as well pack up. You’re finished.” He read from the article: “David Irving, who appears substantially to have over-estimated his mental stability this time …” “They’re calling you mad!”

Recycled Lies

I responded by saying, “Okay, so what? Are they going to assign me to some kind of psychiatric gulag archipelago? That’s from the Sunday Times, and this is Monday.” That’s the difference between being an author and being a journalist. When I write a book it goes into a library and stays there — especially if it’s on acid-free paper. What a journalist writes for the Sunday Times appears on Sunday, but by Monday it’s wrapping fish ‘n chips! So who cares? Or if it’s not wrapping fish ‘n chips, the paper’s being recycled to be made into new newsprint for new lies.

One South African journalist wrote to me during the height of my South African tour in March 1992. I was speaking at meeting after meeting, addressing packed halls. In Pretoria, as usual, 2,000 people came to hear me. In Cape Town, another huge audience turned out to hear me at the Goodwood Civic Centre. The next day, I received a fax letter from a Cape Times journalist named Claire Bisseker who earlier had bombarded me with questions about what I thought about President de Klerk, the prospects for South Africa, the ANC, and all the rest of it. This time her letter was quite brief:

Mr. Irving, the Cape Times would like to have your response to the following allegations made by a Capetonian who atted your meeting at Goodwood [Centre] on March 8. The source said that the meeting was of a neo-Nazi nature. Complete with Nazi banners and Nazi salutes. We would appreciate it very much if you could fax back to us your response as soon as you are able.

So I turned this matter over in my mind. “Remember,” I told myself, “you’re dealing with a journalist — a journalist who will twist whatever you say. If I say that I have no comment, they will print the lies and say that Mr. Irving had no comment. If I deny it, they will print the lies and say that Irving denied it. They will print lies whatever you do.” So after some thought, I sent this brief letter to Claire Bisseker:

Dear Clair,

Thank you for your fax, and I appreciate your inquiry. Yes, you do have excellent sources. Neo-Nazi nature, Nazi banners, and Nazi salutes — the lot. As I marched in, an orchestra struck up the Slaves’ Chorus from Verdi’s opera, “Aida.” Later, the orchestra played the first bars of Franz Liszt’s “Les Préludes,” and it concluded with Liszt’s Opus 63 String Quartet. Meanwhile, searchlight batteries stationed around the Goodwood Civic Centre lit up, their crystal beams joining in a cathedral of ice ten thousand feet above the site; a thousand hands were once more flung aloft in the holy salute, and a thousand throats roared the Horst Wessel anthem. A video is available, directed by Leni Riefenstahl.

I hope the above material suffices for what you have in mind.

That’s the way to deal with journalists! I have developed my own techniques in dealing with them.

David Irving

#hitlr #free speech #david irving #books #history #real history #writers #germany #ww2 #differences of opionion #research #facts #documents #hws italy #usa #europe #war

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iamthinkinglegos · 5 years

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It’s ya boy: Kilroy.

Photo credit: Luis Rubio from Alexandria, VA, USA - Kilroy was here, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3558598

As you can see, Kilroy has visited the World War II memorial in Washington D.C. This iconic drawing answers many questions about itself. Who made this? Kilroy did. Why did he make this? To leave a record of where he was. Where has this fella been? More like, where hasn’t he been? Have you seen the places this graffiti shows up?

But there remain two questions that are not answered by the typical depiction of Kilroy: where did he come from, and where did he go and what was his rhetorical function? Well, I may be the only one asking that latter one, but I digress.

Kilroy: Origins

Kilroy, as we understand him today, came about during the second world war. His exact origins are unknown, but he has an intellectual lineage that can be traced back to 1938 or 1941, depending on which origin story you like more.

The first of his intellectual progenitors is known as Mr. Chad, or just Chad. Chad is a figure whose origins are as shrouded as Kilroy’s. Just like Kilroy, he is a bald (or mostly bald) man peeking over a wall with an abnormally long nose.

Mr. Chad with a version of his catchphrase and a single hair. [source]

There are two prevalent theories on how Chad came into being. The first of them involves a British cartoonist named George Edward Chatterton. Supposedly, Chatterton drew the original back in 1938, and his nickname “Chat” went on to become the name of the drawing “Chad”. [source]

Another story claims that Chad was spawned around the year of 1941 by a lecturer in a school in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. While illustrating the affect of a capacitor in a circuit, the phrase “wot, no electrons” was added to a portion of the drawing that resembled a face.

[source]

There are other variations on that story, featuring electricians and/or military engineers adding “wot, no ___?” to illustrations like the one above. Unfortunately, none of these stories (at least in my mind) really explains why Chad became used widely amongst the military, especially when one considers that shortages and rationing (the things Chad typically complained about) would have affected civilians approximately as much as it did the military.

Regardless of where it came from, this simple design would go on to become Kilroy’s body. The accompanying phrase, however, is even more difficult to pin down. This is due mostly to the fact that “___ was here” is an extremely generic phrase to find graffitied. . . well anywhere really. Fortunately, there is a probable origin of the phrase! In December of 1946, the New York Times attempted to get to the bottom of the phrase’s origin. After holding an event to determine who came up with Kilroy, they landed on James J. Kilroy, a welding inspector who worked in the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. Welding inspectors used a small chalk mark to approve a piece of work. But, that was easily erased by welders so they might be paid twice for their work. Purportedly, Mr. Kilroy decided to mark his inspections with the phrase “Kilroy was here” with a material that was more difficult to erase. This lead to the phrase being discovered in sealed spaces on ships, the kind of spaces that no one had been before. That lead to a competition among US airmen to reach obscure and otherwise out-of-the-way locations before Kilroy could. [source]

Another theory involves a Sergeant Francis J. Kilroy Jr. In this story, Sgt. Francis wrote “Kilroy will be here next week” on a barracks builtin board, to inform his fellows of his imminent return after a run in with the flu. This prompted the phrase to be picked up and spread by other US airmen. [source]

The common nature of the phrase “Kilroy was here” combined with the easily recreated drawing known as “Mr. Chad” and gave birth to a graffiti phenomenon that lasted for decades.

Now before I move on I want to give an honorable mention to Australia’s “Foo was here”. Foo was a graffiti character in much the same vein as Chad and Kilroy. He was also a head that tended to peek over walls, though his nose was of a much more reasonable size. Foo was accompanied by the phrase “Foo was here”. Unlike Kilroy and Chad, Foo dates all the way back to the first world war, and was a creation that followed the First Australian Imperial Force. Foo evolved over the years and by the time WWII came around he was depicted as a gremlin or a devil often within (or having escaped from) a cage. It is also worth noting that unlike the previous stories, there is nothing that can directly tie Foo to Kilroy or Chad. [source]

Kilroy: Functions

Kilroy had many functions over the years. He let military servicemen know where their comrades had been before. Hiding his visage in the most obscure of locations must have been a humorous pastime for some people. But the function of Kilroy that I wish to discuss is his use as a panopticon.

First things first though. What the hell is a panopticon? Without getting too far into it, the concept of a panopticon is this: an object, person, or event that instills in its viewer a sense of being watched, typically in such a way that they mediate or otherwise alter their own actions. A simple example would be a teacher when their students are taking a test. The mere presence of a teacher may be enough to prevent people from attempting to cheat. The implication of authority is also important to panopticons, if you know your best friend is watching you, you likely wouldn’t alter your behavior too much, if at all; if you know a police officer is watching you, you may be less inclined to smoke weed, go over the speed limit, or even jaywalk. If you wish to go a bit more in depth on panopticons you may do so here.

Allow me to start this part by saying that not every Kilroy is a panopticon. Even the ones that are, aren’t to every viewer. Simply put, the groups that spread Kilroy’s image need never worry that the he is watching them. To a certain extent, anyone who draws Kilroy is Kilroy. And since the people who drew him are English speaking (mostly US) military servicemen, and the citizenry they serve, anyone outside of those groups observing Kilroy may see the watchful eyes of the US staring at them.

To share an example of dubious authenticity, picture yourself in the year of 1945. Germany has surrendered and you and the Allied leaders, Churchill and Truman, are going to decide the fate of Germany (after the Krauts started and lost their second world war). As you may have already guessed, you are Stalin: the leader of the Russian people and a ruthless dictator. You have arrived in Potsdam, and are ready to discuss terms with your allies. Upon arriving, you are given a brief tour of the facilities from which you will negotiate. Your guide finally arrives at the grand VIP bathroom, an opulent room befitting one of your status. The guide encourages you to go in without him, for even he is not allowed inside. You take a moment to relieve yourself; the journey here was a long one. You return to the guide and complete the tour. Hours pass. You have completed the first round of talks with your allies, and all the water you drank to sooth your parched throat has come back to haunt you. You return to the bathroom you visited previously in the day, and use the exact same toilet you used last time. As the tight squeeze on your bladder lifts, you notice something that wasn’t there before. A small man with a large nose is peeking at you from over a wall, with the English phrase “Kilroy was here” written next to him. Your knowledge of the English language is limited, but you know enough to say with certainty that an English speaking individual named Kilroy had been in your VIP bathroom. Fury clouds your mind as you somehow manage to keep everything in the toilet bowl. If Kilroy had been here, where only you and the two other VIPs were allowed, where else could this man have been? What else could he have seen? As you leave the bathroom, you use the time spent washing your hands to calm your mind. Perhaps this was someone your aides know about. You return to the conference room, where the translator for the English speakers still resides. Your presence brings your aides to full attention, and you ask them (in Russian) “Who is Kilroy?”. [source, take it with a grain of salt] [also, here is a source that says Stalin had a decent grasp on the English language]

That dramatization of events that may or may not have happened illustrates Kilroy’s use as a panopticon. Once Stalin got context on who Kilroy was, he may have concluded that his actions at Potsdam had more spectators than he anticipated. Which may have then lead him to acting differently than he would have otherwise. Even if it didn’t happen, the fact that it is a story that was told speaks to how others could see his use as a panopticon.

Another story that is even less likely to be true is one involving Hitler. Allegedly German soldiers had found the phrase “Kilroy was here” written on captured US equipment. Hitler, in his infinite paranoia, decided that it could be the name of an American spy. [”source”]

Whether or not either of these stories are true they illustrate how Kilroy is capable of operating as a panopticon.

In conclusion:

We came into this asking hard questions, that kind that couldn’t be answered just by looking at the average depiction of Kilroy. We learned that this iconic piece of American history (probably) came from distinctive British Graffiti, and an American welding inspector. We then briefly considered Foo, before promptly forgetting about him. We finished with Kilroy being more than just a humorous piece of graffiti, and instead saw him act as the eyes of authority: a panopticon. This simple drawing went on to become more than the sum of his parts, and has been immortalized not just on the WWII memorial in Washington D.C., but also in the hearts and souls of all those who carry on his legacy.

#kilroy was here #kilroy #wwii #second world war #til #today i learned

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thewidowstanton · 5 years

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Stav Meishar, multi-disciplinary performer and creator – The Escape Act: A Holocaust Memoir

Stav Meishar – a stage artist who mixes theatre, circus, music, dance, poetry and puppetry – was born and raised in Tel Aviv in Israel. She attended the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts and has worked professionally as an actress since childhood, notably starring in Wicked’s original Israeli cast.

After moving to the US in 2008, Stav has performed internationally in Hebrew, English and Yiddish. In 2012 she founded Petit Mort Productions to provide an outlet for multi-disciplinary artists whose works are “innovative, unique and perhaps a bit strange”. In 2013, her play The Dreamer and the Acrobat ran at the NY Frigid Festival, and she made her circus debut on silks in the Off-Broadway revival of The Megile of Itzik Manger.

Stav is now based in Bristol and this month embarks on a UK tour of her solo show The Escape Act: A Holocaust Memoir, which is based on the life of Jewish-German circus artist Irene Danner. Stav chats to Liz Arratoon in the run-up to its UK premiere at Jacksons Lane in London on 23 September 2019.

The Widow Stanton: Is there any showbusiness in your background? Stav Meishar: Almost everybody in my family is in love with the arts but nobody else makes it. Everybody does other things around it. My mother is an arts critic, lecturer and guide. She knows everything there is to know about arts but when I asked her if she ever wanted to make any, she said: “Heavens, no!” My dad owns a business he funded… it’s kind of hard to explain but it’s like an archive of Israeli folk dancing. So ever since I was little whenever a new Israeli folk dance would be created, he’d get the choreographer and a bunch of volunteer dancers and videotape it, with instructions, so that enthusiasts around the world can learn how to dance.

How did you start performing so young? I’ve always loved attention [laughs]. There’s video tapes of me when I’m two or three years old doing, like, hand puppetry. Not with actual puppets, just with my hands. I think it was a Mr and a Mrs who met at a movie theatre and fell in love. It was always something I wanted and I used to scour the newspapers when I was little for audition notices. So when there was one for an Israeli production of Oliver Twist I figured, why not be an orphan? [Laughs]

So you just auditioned and got the part? Yep! The production was first in Tel Aviv. There’s a big tradition in Israel on Hanukkah to have shows for the family because everyone’s off from school and the parents are going crazy trying to find something different for the kids. I was… 11, I think, and then the following year it toured all around Israel. I had a lovely time.

What happened about your schoolwork and all that boring stuff? If I remember correctly, the rehearsals were about a half-hour bus ride from my school and I had to get special permission to leave the last class a bit early, so that I could make it on time. All the kids were really mean to me about it: “Oh, you know, she’s hoity-toity with her rehearsals.” I’d rehearse every day and get home at about 7pm.

But being on tour… I think because Israel is so small it’s a bit different to what we think of as tours in the UK or US. There were about 50 kids in the cast so the production would hire a bus and I think there was at least one adult from the production with us.

Was the Thelma Yellin school like a Fame school or something? [Laughs] It’s pretty much what you imagine when you think of a performing arts school; a little bit like Fame. It’s a great school in Israel that still exists and has a great reputation. All the students have to be good at all the regular subjects. You can’t slack off in any of that but you also have to choose one of six artistic majors: theatre, classical music, jazz, cinema, visual arts and dance. So mine was theatre. I was there from 14 to 18.

Why did you move to the US? I always wanted to be in musical theatre, and originally the dream was London. I got accepted at a few schools here but none of them had international scholarships. There was a lot of crying and sadness around that [laughs] and then I picked myself up by the bootstraps and figured, ‘Well, I’ve got to come up with a plan B’, and I got accepted to a musical theatre programme in New York at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy that did have quite a generous international student scholarship.

I worked my arse off for about two years saving every shekel I could and got some help from my parents as well, God bless them, and yes, I moved to the States and studied musical theatre. I graduated and worked in professional musical theatre in New York for about a year and then one day I woke up and realised, ‘I hate it!’. Not musical theatre, I still love that, but the business around it; how mean everybody is and how soul-crunching open calls are. I couldn’t do it anymore.

This crisis was in about 2010 and I was in a really dark place for a while and decided, ‘I’m just going to see as much theatre and performing arts as I can and see if I can get inspired by any of it, and take as many classes as I can in all kinds of different things’. So I took yoga, and I took Pilates and all kinds of stuff… and I took a silks class and uh… well… yeah, fell in love. [Laughs]

Where did you learn your circus skills? I trained for a long time at the Circus Warehouse in New York, which is a fantastic space with really high-level professional training. It’s not a university, it’s not accredited, but the level is super high and the coaches are all fantastic.

I see also you play ukulele and do poi spinning… have you got anything else up your sleeve? I had a year or two of trying a bunch of different things. I still play the ukulele mostly for my own pleasure. I took a street show to the Edinburgh Fringe for a couple of years where I put together Shakepearean monologues with whatever was popular that day on MTV, on the ukulele. So Taming of the Shrew and how badly he treats her, how awful he is leading into Bad Romance by Lady Gaga. That was fun for a little while.

Oh, and poi spinning… I do a lot of things none of them in any way as professional as I do theatre. You can’t do too many things well. You do a lot, you end up being OK at most of them. I’m skilled in a lot of things but wouldn’t consider myself expert in all of them. Theatre is where I’m most confident… history, specifically World War II history is something I’m very confident in, and Jewish education is something I feel an expert on. Circus is always a tricky thing because I’ve been doing it long but I have never done it with enough… let’s put it that way, I started late and I’m lazy.

Have you done stuff at Circomedia, being in Bristol? Yeah, I just did one year full time there, basically shadowing their foundation degree students doing all the practical stuff but none of the academic stuff, because I already have my degree. It sounds much more than I’m capable of. Yes, I just graduated from a full-time programme; I’m still pretty shit at circus but I never intended, like, I don’t market myself as an acrobat. I’m a multidisciplinary artist who has a lot of tools and because this current project is about a circus artist, I had to have some circus skills thrown into the melting pot of the show, but I’ve been really adamant with everybody where I’m performing, don’t market it as circus show or people will be really disappointed. It’s a theatre show. It has puppetry, it has circus but I’m no more a circus acrobat than I am a puppet master.

So let’s talk about The Escape Act. How did it come about? It was completely random. I started my Jewish education company, Dreamcoat Experience, and our niche, so to speak, was teaching progressive Jewish education using performing arts: drama, music, puppets, thing like that, and I started weaving circus methods into our curriculum. I was curious if anyone had done that before and I went to Google and I typed in ‘Circus Jews’ and one of the first things to come up was the New York Times obituary for Adolf Althoff, the German circus owner who saved this Jewish family. I just remember reading it and my jaw dropping to the floor going, ‘How is there not a movie about this?’. It was incredible. I just started going into this Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole from which I never emerged.

You’ve written about Irene Danner’s story for Circus Talk, but give us a brief outline of her story. In seven years of research, I uncovered a lot and it’s a big story. The short of it is, Irene, born Danner, was a descendent of the Lorch family, Jewish Circus royalty; they were the most famous Risley act of their time. They performed with the Ringling Brothers in America, they went on tour with Circus Sarrasani in South America, they really were the celebs of their time. The circus closed when she was about seven years old; they went bankrupt around 1930 with the rise of anti-semitism and people not really wanting to see ‘the Jew circus’ anymore.

Irene trained as a acrobat from when she was little and got her first job when she was 13, with Circus Busch. She was the flyer for the horse-riding troupe The Carolis and was there for three years until the law changed and Jews weren’t allowed to work anymore. About three years later she went to see the Circus Althoff and fell in love with their clown, Peter Bento. Peter asked Adolf if he would give her a job. Adolf knew it wasn’t legal but he didn’t really give a shit, excuse the language. That’s his, not mine. She was not allowed to marry Peter because of the racial laws of the time but they had two kids during the war and three more afterwards.

At some point when the Jews were starting to get deported, she persuaded Mr Althoff to let her family join as well; so her sister and her parents, and all four of them survived the war. Other members of her family didn’t make it. If you visit their house there are a few stumbling stones outside for all those who perished. The idea is that you shouldn’t just be reminded of the Holocaust when you decide to be by going to a memorial, but that you stumble upon them.

The Escape Act is as faithful to the story as I could make it but I took some artistic liberties. For example, she joined the Althoff circus because she fell in love, but in the show I’ve made it that she joins because she misses performing and she wants to do what she loves. It’s a bit of a feminist twist; she’s making her own path.

So in the show, you’re doing a bit of trapeze and juggling but it’s a theatre show? It is definitely a theatre show. It’s quite text heavy.

How did you go about your research? I started at the Yad Vashem Museum – the big Holocaust museum in Israel – because the obit mentioned that Adolf Althoff and his wife Maria, had received the honour of the title ‘The Righteous Among the Nations’ from Yad Vashem, which is a special sort of order, I guess, for Gentiles who saved Jews during World War II. As they’d given them this honour I assumed they’d have files on them and indeed they had.

They had interviews with both Adolf and Irene… photos… and then I just started visiting museums, archives, libraries, just picking information wherever I could, speaking to whoever I could. I wish I spoke German; my research would have been so much better. A lot of my info came from a wonderful book called Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment. It’s the only English book available that talks about circus performers in Germany during that era. Of course I looked at the bibliography and saw where I could branch off from there.

One of the books I got in German is this tiny little book that’s all interviews and testimonies from Irene, her husband, Adolf, basically everybody involved. I crowd-sourced the translation. I just reached out on Facebook and got something like ten German speakers to translate two chapters each voluntarily. So I got the whole book translated out of the goodness of their hearts. One of my favourite things described was the friendship that Irene and her husband had with a Moroccan acrobat called Mohammed; Muslim, of course, and being Jewish, I was like, yes, Jewish/Muslim friendship, yay! He was their best friend during the war and he helped hide them, he protected them, they were really each other’s backbone.

Years later when I went to Irene’s town and interviewed her kids, who are now in their seventies, I asked them if they were still in touch with any of the saviours. Her eldest son was like: “Ja, ja, we still speak, Christmas cards, birthday cards, but the one we are really in touch with, we speak every week on the phone, is Uncle Momo.” It just took me a second… I’m like, ‘Do you mean Mohammed?’. He goes: “Yes, yes, he lives in Tangier now.” ‘I’m sorry, is he still alive?’. “Yes, he just celebrated his 94th birthday.”

It was just incredible! So here I am in a living room in Germany, learning that there’s one person still alive from that era, and here’s the real amazing thing… this was in May and in June my husband and I were booked on our honeymoon, guess where? Morocco! That was incredibly random. It was meant to be. I told Irene’s son, ‘It so happens we’re going to Morocco. Will you please connect me with Mohammed?’. So a few weeks later, there we were in his living room in Tangier.

What does it mean to you to be performing the show in Germany on the anniversary of Kristallnacht? I think I’m actually more terrified than honoured, because her kids are probably going to be there and I’m so terrified that they’ll be angry at me for making changes. That’s my own demons and whatnot. I think as an artist it’s something of a trait to imagine a worst-case scenario. It’s something we do to ourselves but I’m sure it will a wonderful experience and hopefully her kids will love it. I did ask for their blessing and they gave it to me.

But just talking to you I get emotional about bringing the show on Kristallnacht because this is where it all took place. Even when I visited there last year it was really emotionally difficult to be in that synagogue where I know Kristallnacht happened, and to be in the family’s home where I know Irene saw her own grandmother being snatched away. In those places there’s a visceral element to being in the spot where it happened. Like visiting Auschwitz is different than reading about it. And there is a scene in the show that takes place on Kristallnacht, so to be at the synagogue where it actually happened, in the town where it actually happened, in front of that family, I mean, it’s… ahh! It’s an incredible gift that they’ve given me to invite me to do my show there.

Do you feel, with the rise of the far right, that your show is even more relevant now and it’s even more important that people should hear this story? Yes, absolutely. It’s been in my mind ever since I started researching this history, and every time I think it’s going to become less relevant, it has to get better from here, it doesn’t. It’s getting worse. Every historian has this feeling of helplessness where you see history repeating itself and yet people do it anyway. Even with Germany and all that history, when I talk politics to people, they’re like: “Oh, but it’s getting better now. Gays have the right to marry, trans people are accepted.” But if you look at history, the Weimar Republic happened right before the Nazi regime. They had, like, the biggest gay parties, they had cross-dressers, they had cabarets, they had this amazing period of artistic and sexual liberation and then this happened. I’m not sure that an improvement necessarily says an upward motion.

When I first starting working on the show the thing I really kept thinking about was how the Holocaust was taught to me. Growing up in Israel it’s a big subject in our curriculum. We study it, I dare say, a bit too early, but one of the most powerful experiences that I had growing up and that I saw as a Jewish educator in America is that schools would bring survivors to tell their stories first hand. And that’s always been for me and my students the most powerful experience, more than watching movies, more than seeing pictures of naked skinny bodies. Just having a person there telling you this is what happened, this is what they did to me, to my sister, to my parents, it’s different. And it’s a resource that’s not going to be available forever. Survivors are dying out and the thought that led me in this work is, ‘OK, what experience can I create that would get as close to a first-hand telling as possible?’.

I’d like to think this show is a good alternative. It’s not perfect, it’s never going to replicate that, but telling a story in the first person as if it were my story and taking those moments of stepping away from the character, and being myself and telling my own experiences, more about the after-effects it has, I think that’s powerful for everyone. What’s it like for someone who is descendent of refugees from a genocide? How does that affect you? Here’s this person who was never in the camps, who never starved and who had a pretty cushy, privileged life and yet there’s this scar that was her inheritance, and it’s never going to go away.

Would you say this show is the highlight of your career so far? It’s definitely the most ambitious project I’ve taken. I’ve been a performer for most of my life but I’ve always interpreted other people’s work. That’s what actors do, and this is not the first time I’m doing my own project but it’s the first time I’m doing, first of all a project that I’ve vested so much time and effort in, but it’s also the first project that has autobiographical elements. So the show I would say is 95 per cent Irene’s story but the rest is me and my history.

The way it’s structured is when there are points when her experiences sort of trigger my own memories growing up, I take a step out of Irene and become myself, the house lights go up and I talk to the audience about my own experiences. It’s a wonderful thing as an artist to be able to share that sort of vulnerability with an audience, and it’s absolutely terrifying and it’s difficult. It’s so raw and it’s weird because those things haven’t happened to me. I’m telling the stories of my ancestors and still, yeah, it’s right there in the really innermost parts.

vimeo

Stav Meishar performs The Escape Act: A Holocaust Memoir at Jacksons Lane in London on 23 and 24 September 2019, before a UK tour.

Picture credits: Michael Blase; Asaf Sagi; Kati Rapia: Shirin Tinati: Gilad Kfir

For Jacksons Lane tickets, click here

For tour dates, click here

Stav’s website

Twitter: @stavmeishar

Follow @TheWidowStanton on Twitter

#stav meishar #the escape act #holocaust #theatre interview #jacksons lane #circus #aerialist #jewish artist #yad vashem

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ssnakey-b · 6 years

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My grandpa’s experiences in a Russian POW camp have been turned into a book.

Hi everyone. Today, I’d like to talk about something very personal, yet something that I think is very important to people in general. And to do that, we need to start with a bit of a history lesson.

Most of the people reading this I probably aware that I am French. Well, I was born and still live in Alsace, the easternmost region of the country, whose Eastern border is also the border between France and Germany.

Needless to say, this means that we’ve seen our fair share of conflict, as the two nations have been fighting over us, as well as another region called Lorraine, since... pretty much these two nations have existed. So unsurprisingly, one of the conditions of France’s surrender to Germany during World War 2 was that these two regions would be annexed, meaning they were officially part of Germany, meaning that all able-bodied men in these regions could potentially be drafted in the Wehrmacht, despite not being German. I’ll let you guess what happened to those who tried to refuse, and/or their families.

This happened across multiple countries and in France, we call them the “Malgré-Nous”, which translates to “Against Our Will”, and my grandfather was one of them. And because the Germans of course would rather not risk their superior homeboys, these people forced into the army were sent to fight off the Russians.

At some point, my grandpa’s squad ended up surrounded by Russian forces. They tried to flee, but were eventually caught and taken prisoners. They were sen’t to various prisoner camps, and ended up spending most of their time in the infamous Camp 188 in Tambov.

Now, this was a POW camp, the soldiers there were a bargaining chip for Russia, so they weren’t going out of their way to make people suffer or starve them, but this was a POW camp in soviet Russia, in the middle of the most brutal conflict in human history, so as you can probably guess, the living conditions barley allowed for survival.

I’m not entirely sure why, perhaps just to fight off depression and hunger, but my grandfather decided to keep a journal of it. He even describes the almost slapsticky way in which he had to move his arms around a guard searching him so he wouldn’t see it, and he explains that he eventually sewed hidden pockets inside his coat’s sleeves so he could hide it. It contains not only descriptions of the camp, daily life inside it and the land and wildlife of the area, but he also drew many sketches of what he saw, some of which you can see in these pictures. As an artist myself, I am very proud to see that not only does it run in the family, but he made such an important use of his talent.

Obviously, the journal of a surviving soldier’s experiences in a Russian POW camp is an incredibly rare and valuable document (even my family didn’t find out about it until a few years ago), especially considering the little-known aspect of WW2 of non-German people being forced into their army. Russian people are especially fascinated by this sort of stories because of course, for most of the XXth century, they could only know what their government would allow them to know about their own history.

This is how a French-speaking Russian woman who frequently visits France ended up hearing about the journal in local publications. She had this project of writing a book about the camp, and was looking for first-hand accounts of what it was like. Naturally, as soon as she heard about this, she contacted my parents and asked if she could write about the journal and include pictures of it. It goes without saying that they accepted. In fact, my father had the entire journal scanned in high resolution for just such an occasion (we also intend to have the entire thing printed, with a copy of the letter he received to inform him he was drafted).

Well, as the title of this post says, the book is now complete and its author sent us a copy. Of course, none of us can read Russian, but the author’s daughter is working on a French translation, so I’m very anxiously looking forward to it. There are other people’s accounts as well, my grandpa’s taking up about a third of the book.

Here is the letter announcing he’s been drafted, written on October 24th, 1944. It includes a list of items to get before reporting, such as work shoes, a shovel, a mess kit, etc... notice the “Heil Hitler!” at the end. Also note that although his name was “Geoffrey Rieb”, they of course spelt his name as Gottfried. Similarly, they spelled the name of the street where they wrote this “Rue du travail” (Labour Street) in German, turning it into “Strasse der Arbeit”.

Here’s a map he drew while trying to work out where they were and how much he’d travelled (the guards only spoke a bit of German outside of Russian so they couldn’t provide much information). Oh and one thing that’s not included in the book is that he actually built a makeshift sextant to help in his calculations (note: I believe this specific sketch is from a copy of his journal which he remade more cleanly once he got back home as he clearly realized that all of this needed to be preserved).

On the left page, he specifies the many nationalities the people he met during his “stay” (as he put it) in the camps of Lobsch, Pulawy, Segesa and Tambow hailed from: France, Belgium, Luxembourg, ¨Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yougoslavia, Estonia, Lettonia, Hungary, Italy, Romania and Austria. He explains that all prisoners except for the Germans wore caps with their national colours on.

He also adds that in each camp, you had an easier time depending on your nationality: if you were Austrian in Lobsch, German in Pulawy, Polish in Segesa, and in Tambow... you had to be a teacher. It’s a bit of a joke since the camp almost exclusively included French prisoners, to the point it ended up being nicknamed “The French camp”.

On the right page is a sketch titled “Those who aren’t coming back.....” and depicts the Alsacian graveyard of Tambow. Yeah, let us not forget that around 8000 people died there. My grandpa was one of the lucky ones.

To the right is a sketch of another camp he went through, Rada. To the left is one of my favourite sketches, of which you can see a variation on the cover, of “Soup time at the Segesa train station”. These lines of people eating what little they could get is really striking. But what really stuck in my mind is an anecdote my grandpa relates. I’m not sure it was exactly at that moment, but on his way back, he mentions stopping at a train station and being so hungry he decided to trade his sweater for a sausage.

I wish nobody to ever be so desperately hungry that they are willing to literally trade the clothes on their backs for a sausage, in the middle of Northern Russia. And I wish for nobody to be desperately cold that they’re willing to trade what little food they have for a sweater.

It’s not all cold, hunger and sadness though. There are sketches of the beautiful nature, some amusing stories like the prisoners organising a football tournament, even being able to form national teams, some heartwarming moments like my grandpa making plans for renovations in their countryside home (which he eventually did make!).

And then there are also some truly incredible moments, like when the prisoners decided to take turns giving each-other lectures on their job. This is what the sketch on the left in the top picture is for, as it describes one of the machines my grandpa used for his job.

But that’s not what makes this story incredible. See, one of the people giving a lecture was a German engineer. And the sketch on right page and on the bottom pic are blueprints my grandpa was able to make based on descriptions by that engineer. You may have noticed it looks like a rocket. And if you look carefully at the top right sketch, you may have noticed the name V1.

That’s right, this guy was a military engineer, giving the prisoners a lecture on Germany’s signature weapon. now I’m going to go ahead an assume this sort of information was top secret, with major consequences should any info about it leak, and yet here it is in my grandpa’s journal. This blew my mind when I first saw it and I wondered if I was seeing this right.

This to me can only mean one of two things: either this guy expected to die in this camp, so he wasn’t scared for himself should the Russia get a hold of it and he was branded a spy and/or a traitor back in Germany, but even then you’d think he wouldn’t want to endanger his nation, or at least he’d fear for his family, or he knew that even if the Russians did find the blueprints, the Nazis would have fallen out of power by the time word got back to Germany. Either way, I’m still having a hard time comprehending that this is real and my grandfather got to hear it straight from one of the engineers.

But this also speaks volume about the situation these men were in. They were all trained, indoctrinated to hate and want to kill one-another. Propaganda was everywhere on all sides of the conflict. Just look at how hateful some of the European or American war posters were. And in Germany, we’re talking about a Nazi dictatorship, a regime raising an entire generation to believe that genocide was the right thing to do, so the incitement to blind hatred was especially strong.

And yet, here they all were, talking to each-other, educating one-another, exchanging ideas, trading as equals, ignoring nationalities, ethnicities and culture. Because when you’ve hit rockbottom, when you’re all neck-deep in the same shithole, tired, starving, and unsure if you’ll still be alive by the end of the week... who can still give a crap about such petty issues? I get the feeling that for them, the war was over long before any treaty was signed.

I hope you found this as interesting as I did and that it’s giving you a new perspective on World War 2, that conflicts are always so, so much more complicated than “good guys vs bad guys” and how the people most directly involved by it wanted nothing more than to live in peace and let their neighbours do the same.

For me, it’s also a very personal document, as my grandpa died when I was still very young and I don’t have many memories of him, so finding this helps me connect with him a little bit more. I’ll keep you posted when the French version is completed and who knows? Maybe we’ll make more. I just know I want as many people as possible to know about this. Remembering these events is our duty to the World and to future generations.

Oh and if you have any questions regarding this, feel free to ask, I’ll answer them to the best of my avbilities.

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dunnystuff · 3 years

Text

IS THE SUN SETTING?

From an unknown author born in 1942

“Men, like nations, think they’re eternal. What man in his 20s or 30s doesn’t believe, at least subconsciously, that he’ll live forever? In the springtime of youth, an endless summer beckons.

As you pass 70, it’s harder to hide from reality.

Nations also have seasons: Imagine a Roman of the 2nd century contemplating an empire that stretched from Britain to the Near East, thinking: This will endure forever…. Forever was about

500 years, give or take.

France was pivotal in the 17th and 18th centuries; now the land of Charles Martel is on its way

to becoming part of the Muslim ummah. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sun never set

on the British empire; now Albion exists in a perpetual twilight. Its 95-year-old sovereign is a

fitting symbol for a nation in terminal decline. In the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to buy the world.

Business schools taught Japanese management techniques. Today, its birth rate is so low and its

population aging so rapidly that an industry has sprung up to remove the remains of elderly

Japanese who die alone.

I was born in 1942, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century – the American century. America’s prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the ‘Greatest Generation, we won a World

War fought throughout most of Europe, Asia and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and

put the rising sun to bed. It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity.

We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia, and fought international terrorism. We

rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world. We built skyscrapers and rockets

to the moon. We conquered Polio and now COVID. We explored the mysteries of the Universe and

the wonders of DNA…the blueprint of life.

But where is the glory that once was Rome? America has moved from a relatively free economy to socialism – which has worked so well NOWHERE in the world. We’ve gone from a republican government guided by a constitution to a regime of revolving elites. We have less freedom with

each passing year, becoming more and more dependent upon a gov’t which can never provide

for us.

Like a signpost to the coming reign of terror, the cancel culture is everywhere. We’ve traded the American Revolution for the Cultural Revolution. The pathetic creature in the White House is an

empty vessel filled by his handlers. At the G-7 Summit, ‘Dr. Jill’ had to lead him like a child. In 1961, when we were young and vigorous, our leader was too. Now a feeble nation is technically

led by the oldest man to ever serve in the presidency. We can’t defend our borders, our history (including monuments to past greatness) or our streets. Our cities have become anarchist

playgrounds. We are a nation of dependents, mendicants, and misplaced charity. Homeless

veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels.

The president of the United States can’t even quote the beginning of the Declaration of Independence (‘You know — The Thing’) correctly. Ivy League graduates routinely fail history tests that 5th graders could pass a generation ago. Crime rates soar and we blame the 2nd. Amendment and slash police budgets.

Our culture is certifiably insane. Men who think they’re women. People who fight racism by seeking to convince members of one race that they are inherently evil, and others that they are perpetual victims.

A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale said she fantasizes about ‘unloading a revolver into the head of any white person. We slaughter the unborn in the name of freedom, while our birth rate dips lower year by year. Our national debt is so high that we can no longer even pretend that we will repay it one day. It’s a $28-trillion monument to our improvidence and refusal to confront reality. Our ‘entertainment’ is sadistic,

nihilistic and as enduring as a candy bar wrapper thrown in the trash. Our music is noise that spans the spectrum from annoying to repulsive.

Patriotism is called insurrection, treason celebrated, and perversion sanctified. A man in blue gets less respect than a man in a dress. We’re asking soldiers to fight for a nation our leaders no longer believe in. How meekly most of us submitted to Fauci-ism (the regime of face masks, lock-downs and hand sanitizers) shows the impending death of the American spirit.

How do nations slip from greatness to obscurity? *Fighting endless wars they can’t or won’t win.

* Accumulating massive debt far beyond their ability to repay. *Refusing to guard their borders, allowing the nation to be inundated by an alien horde. *Surrendering control of their cities to mob rule. *Allowing indoctrination of the young. *Moving from a republican form of government to an oligarchy *Losing national identity. *Indulging indolence *Abandoning faith and family – the bulwarks of social

order.

In America, every one of these symptoms is pronounced, indicating an advanced stage of the disease. Even if the cause seems hopeless, do we not have an obligation to those who sacrificed so much to give us what we had? I’m surrounded by ghosts urging me on: the Union soldiers who held Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, the battered bastards of Bastogne, those who served in the cold hell of Korea, the

guys who went to the jungles of Southeast Asia and came home to be reviled or neglected.

This is the nation that took in my immigrant grandparents, whose uniform my father and most of my uncles wore in the Second World War. I don’t want to imagine a world without America, even though it becomes increasingly likely. During Britain’s darkest hour, when its professional army was trapped at Dunkirk and a German invasion seemed imminent, Churchill reminded his countrymen, ‘Nations that go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.

The same might be said of causes. If we let America slip through our fingers, if we lose without a fight, what will posterity say of us? While the prognosis is far from good, only God knows if America’s day in the sun is over.”

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deutscheshausnyu · 5 years

Text

Interview with DAAD Visiting Scholar at Deutsches Haus at NYU, Angela Zumpe

Angela Zumpe is a filmmaker, media artist, and painter, who lives and works in Berlin. She studied painting, installation, and video at the Berlin University of the Arts, after which she attended New York University to study film via a grant from the DAAD. In 1998, Angela Zumpe followed the call to the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences and became Professor for Audiovisual Media in the Department of Design, where she helped shape new ways of life and teaching. She specializes in digital images, experimental videos, and film productions. Her past film projects include The Other America (2004), The Colors of Ageing (2005), Transit (2010), and The Pastor's Children (2017). Her short films have been screened at several festivals, including the “Screening War” at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Angela Zumpe was already a guest at Deutsches Haus at NYU with her films in the past, most recently with The Pastor's Children – Punks, Politicians and Philosophers in 2017. This time, she will present parts of her new art book, I Am Taking the Ghosts with Me… (Distanz Verlag, 2019), reflecting her twenty years of working and lecturing in and near the Bauhaus in Dessau. In addition, Angela Zumpe will present a screening of her latest film project, Things to Come, which explores the lives of Bauhaus’s László, Lucia, and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, between 1929 and 1935, using projection methods inspired by the artists. The centennial of the Bauhaus is sparking a discussion about the institution and its ideas once more. What remains of the original ideas and how are they still relevant today? Angela Zumpe uses the occasion to critically reexamine the Bauhaus and its reception. Please join us for the talk and the screening “Teaching and Thinking the Bauhaus after 1989: Angela Zumpe's Time in Dessau” on Friday, November 15, at 6pm, at Deutsches Haus at NYU.

After graduating from the Berlin University of the Arts, you came to New York to study film at NYU via a grant from the DAAD. In your opinion, what about New York has changed since your residence here as a student?

I feel New York is a lot safer than back in 1981. When I came to New York on a scholarship to study film at NYU, I swapped rooms with my girlfriend’s American boyfriend in Williamsburg. It wasn´t fancy at all at that time. Drugs and other crimes made the neighborhood a bit unsafe. But I liked the Puerto Rican neighborhood which was strictly separated from the Hasidic Jewish area. I went to explore their food and I was fascinated by their way of living. Today, my former roommate Madison Smart Bell is a well-known writer. In 2014, I made a short film portrait of him, when we walked again through Williamsburg.

I have to admit that I find New York much more expensive than seven years ago, when I came here with my students from Dessau for a joint project with my colleague at NYU, Mechthild Schmidt Feist, and her students. In an intensive workshop, we did short film and interactive projects about different NYC neighborhoods.

My American friend Nadine replied to my complaints about the high prices in Greenwich Village: “You should look at it this way: if you go in a restaurant here, you rent the space for a certain amount of time.”

Where do you draw inspirations for your work? Which artists, authors, or thinkers, if any, have influenced your ideas and style throughout your career?

I met some American artists on my DAAD graduate study scholarship to NYU in 1981, right after my art degree from the University of Art in Berlin. I saw Merce Cunningham at the Brooklyn Academy, John Cage at MoMA, and Philip Glass, the composer of serial music, at a lecture in the Whitney Museum. What these artists all had in common was that they merged film, dance, music, popular culture, and politics with new media. Back then, they were all a part of a lively art scene in NY.

I felt connected to their approaches and experiments, some reaching back to American pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg. I was fascinated by the casual manner with which they integrated everyday materials into their art and by the feeling of freedom in the large formats, which I also felt in the work of the abstract expressionists that I saw in American museums at that time. My fascination with Rauschenberg was already unmistakable in my Master’s thesis, which took the form of assemblages.

Your latest book, I Am Taking the Ghosts with Me…, which you will be presenting at Deutsches Haus at NYU on November 15, recounts your extensive experience at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Desssau – the ideals of the Bauhaus, your colleagues, your projects, etc. What would you say were/are the connections between the historic Bauhaus and the university’s department of design?

I asked myself, “What did I expect when I followed the call to the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences and became Professor for Audiovisual Media in the Department of Design?” Thinking of the Bauhaus and their revolutionary ideas of new ways of working and living in the 1930s, I was expecting the possibility of a synergy of art and design, the major departments also at the Bauhaus.

It was also “Stunde 0” (Hour Zero), a new beginning after the reunification of the two Germanys and a chance to shape new ways of life and teaching at a newly-founded university in a historical place.

The material for this book was already there: During my years in Dessau, I photographed everywhere I went in order to remember subjects that inspired me or to keep for myself as a reminder of little stories for films. Because of this practice, I have even assembled a personal archive of photographs of Dessau. They are fragments of an autobiography of my work as a painter and a filmmaker.

During my years teaching at the department of design, I was able to realize several major film and installation projects. One of my goals for the students was to experiment and develop interdisciplinary and cross-media impulses for social renewal from their respective fields. So I let the students participate in the production of my video installations and films similar to the approaches of the Bauhaus masters.

Like a university in the United States, Dessau developed a campus with modern classrooms built along the Bauhausstraße, including a cafeteria and student café. It helped immerse the students. You didn’t go home. You ate in the Kornhaus, slept in the Prellerhaus, and met for breakfast or lunch in the Bauhaus cafeteria. So it resembled the times of the Bauhaus, when living and working were woven together.

Things to Come, your latest film project, which you will also be screening on November 15, reflects on the lives of László Moholy-Nagy and his wives, Lucia and Sibyl, between 1929 and 1935. Aside from being prolific figures of the Bauhaus, what about these artists and their work inspired you to choose them as the focus of this project?

Hungarian-born László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was a painter, photographer, typographer, and stage designer. Between 1923 and 1928, he taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. His oeuvre blazed a trail for future media artists, particularly in the fields of fine-art photography, art film, and film advertisement. My film about László, Lucia, and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Things to Come, focuses on his attempts to make a career in film after his time at the Bauhaus when he came back to Berlin in 1929.

It is the story of visionary light designer Moholy-Nagy. He lacked an audience because his ideas did not suit the taste of the masses. My film translates moments from Moholy-Nagy's eventful life into the style that the artist may have envisioned as the cinema of the future in the 1930s. I also focus on Lucia, his first wife who was the documentary photographer of the Bauhaus, and Sibyl, his second wife, as part of a working relationship.

In the Artmuseum Moritzburg in Halle (Saale), the audience could wander through a light-image-sound collage in a 400 square meter room called “WESTBOX” with thirteen computer-controlled projections, and discover and delve into this network of moving images, sound and color. At the moment, it is shown as a two-channel film installation at Lyonel Feininger Gallery in Quedlinburg.

I was glad how Hattula Moholy-Nagy, the daughter of László and Sybil Moholy-Nagy, reacted to the film: “I liked this fictionalized account of my parents and Lucia very much. Even though events did not unfold in quite that way, the film presents the atmosphere of those troubled times very well. I liked the sympathetic portrayal of Lucia and the inclusion of Theodor Neubauer and Franz Spencer.”

What would you like to achieve during your time here as a DAAD Visiting Scholar at Deutsches Haus at NYU? What about New York, if anything, provides inspiration that you would not be able to obtain in Germany?

I want to step out of my German frame of mind and appreciate the multicultural life, which appears totally natural to me here in New York. In Berlin, I feel an international vibe, but Germany in general still deals with the unsolved problems of integrating the refugees.

For my work, I need inspiring views from the outside. I collect impressions of American art, impressions of the city, film bits, and photographs, and will use them as inspirations for my collages or maybe a new photobook or even a new film.

If we may ask, what are you currently working on?

Following the Moholy-Nagy film project, I am thinking of a film project about the Feininger family, their biographies, and their various involvements in the arts. So far, I still have to build connections. I may do some research at the Feininger Archive at Harvard.

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caj-wind · 7 years

Text

CSM Class - Cannonball

Jacobsen

123 Leslie

94070

THE CANNONBALL

The AT&SF, The Atchinson Topeka and Santa Fe had crawled up the Rio Hondo valley and turned east, rattled through New Mexico, across the Texas pan handle, across the Oklahoma panhandle, angled into Kansas, hit Wichita and then Kansas city. He was on his way home. It been two, well, almost two years since he had been home. His feelings were many and mixed. Had Coalby changed? It would have had to change. Mostly it would be that the drought was over. The country was getting rain. The farmers were getting crops. Then, there had been surveys by the oil companies. The land was coming back and there was a promise of oil. The town itself? Of course there would be a few changes, minor, a fresh coat of paint here, a new sign over and old business there. The people? Most of his class, his high school class and his generation had been pushed out by the drought, the rest had been pulled out by the draft. Of course he had changed. How and how much?

There was a change of trains in Omaha and another in Sioux falls. On the D&N&M, the Denver and Nebraska and Minnesota. After a stop at the State Campus depot the Coalby Cannonball, the diesel dinky, was poking its way from one cluster of grain elevators to the next cluster of grain elevators while it crossed the endless, open country. Back when he had ridden this train to and from State the cars had been crowded with students. They were mostly the college crowd. He was one of them. Now, he felt likehe was a stranger. The other passengers were mostly women, mostly older women and he felt somewhat uncomfortable, somewhat alienated. To them he was a detached bit of the war. A war that should be a long way from here. A war that brought gas rationing and meat rationing and butter rationing and food rationing. Meat and butter and food rationing in the middle of America's bread basket? It was ridiculous and they had to ride the dinky because the ration board wouldn't give them gas stamps. And what was he doing, a young man like him, on this train in that fancy uniform? He should be off to that war, or someplace. But, those old crones have nothing better to do. Come down off it, you can't help what they think. You can't be concerned about them or the whole world or how to change them or how to change the whole world. You can't even make this train go faster. Take off the damn tie and the silly little cap. You have a long way to go.

There were memories. He remembered the morning at State when he had closed the door of his room in the dorm. It was the locking of that door that he remembered. He could still see his hand on the knob testing the door to be sure it was locked and questioning himself. Would he return? Would he ever unlock that door again? Who had lived in that room before he did? Who had lived in that room after he did? There were faces he had never seen and there are faces he would never see. Had they paused, like he had paused, to wonder if that locked door would ever be unlocked? It was a strange reflection.

Was it this town coming up that had a little store across the tracks from the depot? Or was it the next? It was this one, if he ran he could make it.

"Hey soldier, will you pick up a couple of Hamms for me?"

He squinted into the sun. The voice came from the shadows inside theopened baggage car.

"In here, I am in here, will you pick up couple of Hamms for me? I'll hold the train."

Some things change, others never. The Coalby Cannonball was one of the constants, the train crew was another.

"Going home on furlong?"

The word is furlough, furlough, not furlong. Enlisted men get furloughs,officers get leaves.

"Yes, yes I am."

"You're a Coalby boy aren't you?"

The baggage man was the kind who would talk to himself if there wasn't anyone else around. But, Craft was the kind who would find himself talking to himself if he stayed in that passenger car.

"Want to ride up here with me?"

"Beats that bunch of old women."

"Want one of these beers?"

"Thanks, but no, my mother is meeting me."

"She doesn't want to see her boy all beered up?"

"I don't want her to see her boy all beered up."

"You are a one of those flyers aren't you? Almost every day a soldier boy is on this train going home. I don't see many flyers. How long has it been since you were home, since you saw your mama?"

"A couple of years. I write, she writes, there gets to be less and less to write about. She worries. I've got to let her see her son, you know, let her see for herself that her son is o.k."

"What does your mama think of your being a flyer?

"I try to tell her it is better than the infantry."

"Once, I was almost in the infantry. The last one. I tried to volunteer, I was too young. I'm too old for this one and besides I don't know. I think, maybe, this Hitler and the Germans are right and the Russians are wrong."

"How, so."

"Hitler is fighting those Russian Communists." The man pronounced Russian, roo-shan; communists, comm-in-ists.

"Those communists want to take over the whole world. They have sucked us and the Limeys and the Wall Street Jews into doing their dirty work."

Craft, don't open your big mouth and put your big Justin Flight Boot in it. Look around, put things together. Bismark is north of here, and then there is New Leipzig and Breien and Strasburg and Wiesek and New Ulm. This baggage man has done a lot of listening and not much thinking. "I don't think we got sucked up in anything."

"I think we did."

His we, or Craft's we?

"Did you ever think you might be on the wrong side."

"Does a german think he is on the wrong side?"

"No, he is on that side because Germany is his country."

"I'm on this side because I am an American."

"But you could be wrong, America could be wrong."

"My my country, right or wrong."

It was going to be a long, dusty, hot afternoon. Keep some thoughts about this home coming in the back of your mind. One, your uniform reminds these people that there is a war going on. Two, there are a lot of names, german names around here, Bismark, Muller, Ulm, and some of the feelings are different than yours. Three, you are returning home, you have your wings, you have proved your point, but the home town isn't going to give you one damn thing.

"Be glad to get home?"

"Its kind of scary?"

"Does your mama know you are coming?"

"I wrote her when I finished navigation school."

"Did you send a telegram?"

"No, she will know, she will be waiting."

"I guess mothers are always the same."

It would always be the same, the endless miles and the endless time, from the moment when he could see the white Farmer's Co-op elevator and the black Coalby water tower, until the diesel dinky eased by the stock yards and the elevators and the coal chutes and finished its run at the depot.

He was riding in the vestibule and saw his mother before she saw him. She was standing on the platform anxiously looking up at each of dirty windows, trying to catch a glimpse of him through one of those windows. Did his mother look older, tired, care worn? She didn't. If she had he wasn't going to notice. She was still looking up at the windows when he reached out and touched her.

"Mama."

Wordlessly she took his hand and held it as though he was still her little boy. She let her eyes drift up to study his face. He was there, he was her boy, yes, he was her boy. He was her son. When had he grown so tall, so much taller than she?

"Donald, I knew you were coming. I just knew you were coming, then I didn't see you. Oh, Donald, I'm so glad to have you home." Her words were a jumble of words to mask the feelings she wouldn't put into words.

"I could have sent a telegram. I didn't want you to worry if something went wrong and I couldn't make it." His remarks glossed over his feelings.

"I am glad you came home, how long can you stay?"

"The Army is letting me have a week."

"Then you have to go? Where do you have to go?"

"More training." That was a good answer. She didn't need to know he would be on a crew.

"You look nice in uniform. The Army has been good to you?"

"I guess so."

"Oh, Donald I'm so glad you came. I have so many things planned. Is that your only bag? Do you have more bags on the train?"

"This is it, travelling light. Where is your car? He had looked for the grey Ford while the dinky was pulling in and hadn't see it. His mother was pointing to a shiny golden brown Chrysler.

"That is mine. Mr. Kincaid went to Minneapolis and got it for me." His mother was pleased with the new car. It was her statement. It replaced bitter memories.

"Do you want to drive?"

"You drive, I don't want to scratch your new car."

"Have you had anything to eat?"

"Yes."

"What did you have? You've been on the dinky all day."

"Oreos and a coke."

"Donald." She was going to lecture him about what he ate. She would suggest going to the Swede's. He was not going to face the stares and the wordless questions at the Swede's.

"Donald?"

"Yes."

"You could have some supper at the Swede's."

"Mom, have you had supper?"

"No, I was waiting for you."

"Is there anything in the ice box?"

"Some salad and some cold chicken."

The salad would not be anything left over. The chicken would not be a cut-up hen.

"Could we swing up main street and then go home?"

Until the tension between them eased their exchanges skittered around the points where they might disagree. There was just so much that could be rehashed. She had written him bits of local gossip. He had written her bits of Army life. She was looking at his wings. She resented his flying and before that she resented his model airplanes. "Donny the dreamer, will you ever come down to earth?" "No, mom, you just don't understand."

She still did not understand. He sat across the table from her, picking the last bits of meat from the chicken bones. So far as he knew he was the first from Coalby to come home with silver wings pinned above the left pocket and with a gold bar pinned to the right collar. She was trapped somewhere between a mother's concern and a mother's pride.

"Can I pick up the dishes?"

When his mother looked up at him she was smiling. It was a smile hehad never seen before.

"Donny, Donald, this is the first time you ever offered."

"I guess we all change."

Except that his room had been freshly painted it was, as best he could remember, the same as when he left. Some of his clothes still hung in the closet. Did they still fit? The last model airplane he made and the biblefrom his confirmation were on his dresser. His high school diploma and hisconfirmation certificate were framed and hung on the wall. Donny Craft, 2nd Lt. Donald Elgin Craft had returned to Coalby and to his home.

"You can sleep late."

Tomorrow would be one hell of a day. Tomorrow and most of the rest of the week would be his mother's. He did want to see Kincaid and he did want to see Skip. The others? The others didn't matter. He took the tailored gabardines from the B-4 bag put them in his closet to hang out the creases.

It was the quiet that awakened him. For a year whistles and bugles and engines had jarred him into a new day. It was just too quiet. He had heard his mother moving quietly through the house, she would be dressed, the house would be spotless. Her week's plans were in place.

A place was set for him on the kitchen table.

"Mrs. Forrester has asked us to come for dinner, sunday after church. I've got to go to the store, will you walk uptown with me?" 2nd Lt. Donald Elgin Craft was going to be on parade.

xxxx transition xxxx

Even during the summer Jim's always smelled slightly stale. In the winter it smelled of barn clothes and stale beer and stale cigarette smoke. In summer it smelled of sweat, and dust

"What the hell is going on in here?"

"What do you mean."

"The place looks like a kindergarden."

"The place has always looked like a kindergarden to me. You know, I let your bunch hang out here when you looked about as old as those kids do."

"You never let us drink beer. You wouldn't sell us beer until we finished high school.

"Kids are growing up faster now. Most of them are seventeen, by the time they turn eighteen they will be gone. So now I let them smoke, swear a little, have a couple of beers. Two beers and then the night law walks them home. By the time they have walked home and see a kitchen light on, someone waiting, they are pretty sober."

"I hadn't thought of that. We, my bunch have grown older, I didn't think they would. I guess they will."

"They will grow older faster than you did. You had a chance to look around a little, play around a little, grow up a little, most of them won't get that chance. A year from now most of them will be grunts in the grunt army, fighting and killing and dying. They will be men, fighting and killing and dying a couple of thousand miles from here and they can't walk across this room and sit at my bar and legally have a beer."

"And so you sell them a beer?"

"I sell beer if they have money, I give them a beer of they are broke, and then do you know what I do?"

"No."

"I go behind the bar and cry, not real tears, I can't let them see me."

This was a Jim he had never known. It was odd, here was a man, Jim, as big and mean and tough as they come and he was the one who cried. There was bull shit and bands and flags and speeches and bright smiles and here was a man who cried, but he had to keep his tears to himself.

"Good to be home?"

He could level with Jim. "There was a book, I never read it. 'You Can't Go home Again'. The title says it all. I'm here, I grew up here, but, here, Coalby isn't my home anymore."

"But, your mother was glad to see you?"

"Sure. I had to make peace with her. Family. We had our differences. And it is like Coalby, the town wanted me to be one thing, I want to be something else."

"Different?"

"No, I don't want to be different just to be different. I want to be me, whatever that means."

"But isn't that the way everyone feels?"

"I'm sure everyone feels that way. They would change, be different, that is o.k. but, they don't want the rest of the world to change."

"So, Coalby has changed and you have changed? You feel the difference?"

"That about says it."

"Will you be back after? Have you thought about coming back?"

"I don't know. I do know if I do come back, I'll be a stranger."

"You are lucky, you know. These kids, it will be tough."

xxx transition xxxx

"Let's go a little early"

He had every reason to think he was going to feel self conscious. For one thing he hadn't been in that church since his confirmation. For another, he would be in uniform, possibly the only uniform in the congregation. And for another, his mother was going to have her day, she would be dressed, not only in her best, but a her new best, something from Minneapolis or Denver, hat, gloves and all. She would stand stiffly erect beside him and hold the hymnal with him. If they arrived early they could sit in one of the pews toward the rear. Most of the stares would have to be quick, over the shoulder glances. Then they could be first out, shake hands with the pastor, and miss the approving nods of the anointed.

They were seated when the bells rang. The farmers and their wives were always a little early, and were always a little uncomfortable in J.C. Penny suits that were brushed and pressed each Sunday and put back in the closet with the moth balls until the following sunday. The farm wives, even in summer, wore dark dresses that hung in the same closet. A consession to summer was a white hat, a floral purse and pair of white gloves. The town folk, depending on the age of the family car, either walked or drove. Except for the Doctor and the Lawyer and the Dentist who had sunday suits, the rest of the town men wore their every day suits to church. The town wives were less subdued than their country sisters, and wore tans instead of browns, aquas instead of blues.

What the new pastor's sermon was about this sunday he had no idea and he had never, in the past, ever quite followed a sermon all the way through. But there were ways of seeming attentive. One was to observe the patterns of colored lights as they streamed through the stained windows. Another was taking a silent roll call. Although the congregation had changed, new faces replaced old, there was a noticeable age gap. The congregation was either under twenty or over thirty, the twenty year olds, especially the young men were missing. Pastor Sundvig presented a well shaved, cherubic, face with a sunday smile and offered each parishioner a warm, strong hand.

"Good morning, Ellen." His mother touched the pastor's hand and returned his smile.

"And this of Donald?" Unless his mother had been tom cating around, who else could it be?

"Yes, this is my son Donald, he is home for a few days."

"It is so nice to have one of Coalby's boys come home." Praise be, the pastor wasn't asking pop questions about the sermon and instead offered his hearty hand and his pastor's very special smile. That took care of that.

"Marie is expecting us at one."

Marie? Oh, Elizabeth Marie Forrester, and when did we get back to first names? At one time, two of Coalby's young matrons pushed baby carriages, preambulators?, around the same block and shared first names. But the depression had scratched or bruised many and defeated too many. His mother had been forced to retreat but she had survived and her golden brown Chrysler would be parked in front of the Forrester's.

He glanced at his mother while he waited at the stop sign for a pick-up to make the U-turn in front of the courthouse. She was sitting with her white gloved hands placed on the purse in her lap, she was poised and looking straight ahead. Ace had once made the remark that she was a true gentlewoman. She was, but her calm demeanor was deceptive. Beneath that regal poise she was as canny as a high-stakes gambler and as tough as an army boot. He had never quite thought of it before. He was, he had a hard time putting the word into a thought he was silently phrasing. He was, the word was, proud. He was proud of his mother. It was something more than a boy holding his mother's warm hand.

"Park in front."

Mrs. Ellen Lorraine Craft and her son 2nd Lt. Donald Elgin Craft were having sunday dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Richard Malcom Forrester. My, how formal can we be? With a little editing the item would be in the Local Happenings column of the weekly Pioneer Journal. It might be combined with an item about Lt. Craft's graduation from The Army Air Force Navigtion School and his return to Coalby.

"Oh, Ellen, it is so nice you could come and you look so cool, summery, in that new dress. And Donald, welcome home Donald. My, you are handsome in uniform."

It could be a tedious afternoon.

“All the news that is fit to print.”

By the time Coalby's news was printed in the Pioneer Journal any of the local crimes would have been tried over cups of coffee or back yard fences. The guilty would have been singled out to be socially ostracized.

Some of the names were new but the stories were repeats. It was like being in church. He could tune out Mrs. Forrester and his mother as easily as he had tuned out the pastor. Without being obvious about it, and without turning his head his eyes searched the room for something to hold his attention and make him seem to be alert.

It was the picture above the china cabinet. The picture, an oil? It had always been there, but somehow, something was different. It was a picture of Mrs. Forrester's father's church. He knew that, but now he sensed something he had never sensed before. The church was in a green-blue shadowed valley with a white picket fence around the church yard. That church and that church yard could have been Mrs. Forrester's life. She was christened in that church, confirmed in that church, and had sung in its choir. She could have been married there, seen her children christened and confirmed and married there and in her time been buried there. But, she had traded the quiet security of that sheltered valley for this space almost without horizon.

Two fragments of her conversation caught his attention, “so she married Skip”, and, “when Bud married that girl from Hollywood”. It had been her plan, an ambitious mother's plan, Bud would marry Donna Richardson. That wedding would combine the Forrester cattle empire with the Richardson coal empire and Mrs. Richard Malcom Forrester would have been the grande dame of the empire. That plan went down the drain. She did not attend Donna's wedding. Bud could still come back and marry one of the other local girls, and that went down the drain. 'That girl' had a familiar Coalby tone to it and 'that girl from Hollywood' had a bit more of an iced tone.

Donald Elgin craft, you stay out of this. 'That girl from Hollywood' is Lillian and Lillian was not from Hollywood she was from Beverly Hills and really not from Beverly Hills. Lillian was a farm girl from Oklahoma. Did Mrs. Forrester know he had introduced Lillian to Bud? He was not going to make a point of mentioning it.

And that took care of the Forrester item on the Agenda.

And it took care of driving out to the Wilson place. He could see Skip in town. He was sure he didn't want to see Donna Richardson Wilson. Would she still turn his knees to rubber? He didn't want to know. Had she panicked and married Skip because there was no one else around? He didn't want to know that either.

It was tuesday afternoon when he caught a reflection of himself in a window of Allen's Drug. Just how that reflection told him something of himself he didn't know. He could see himself as an amateur actor who was overplaying a dual role. As a dutiful son he had gone through the motions of being a dutiful son, but his mother was a stranger. Her life in Coalby no longer included him and would never include him.

1As one of Coalby's favorite sons, he had never been favorite son. He had always been an oddity and would always be an oddity. Donald Elgin Craft, you are a ham with a minor role, play out this afternoon's scene and tomorrow's scene and exit stage left.

His mother took him to the depot in her Chrysler, went through the motions of being a dutiful mother and stood on the platform and waved to him while the Coalby Canonball eased over the switch to the main track.

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talabib · 6 years

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Leadership Journey: Obama’s Presidency

From building support for the Iran nuclear deal to conducting secret negotiations with the Cuban government, the Obama administration tried to use foreign policy to do good in the world, despite stumbling blocks such as the hyper-partisanship of US politics and the sometimes stubborn and conservative administration in Washington.

We will also explore some of the difficulties faced by a US government up against Russian-funded disinformation campaigns, and a political culture less and less rooted in respect for facts and the truth.

Obama did things differently from other presidential candidates, offering change and a fresh approach.

When Barack Obama first ran for the presidency, in 2007, he represented something new. For starters, he had opposed the Iraq war when almost everyone else supported it. To many, he seemed like a beacon of hope. He used words that sounded moral, and authentic, at a time when Washington politics seemed anything but.

Obama fought his campaign with a promise of change. From a foreign-policy perspective, that meant doing things that went against the grain of establishment thinking.

For instance, Obama called for diplomacy with Iran without preconditions. The Washington political class saw this – or anything that deviated from instinctive “toughness” toward Iran – as a blunder, despite the fact that Iran was quietly progressing its nuclear program. But Obama doubled down, responding to criticisms of his foreign policy by saying, in a nod to the disastrous Iraq war, that he wouldn’t be lectured by people who had supported the greatest foreign-policy mistake of his lifetime.

In most presidential campaigns, foreign policy is a minor issue, with few votes in it beyond veterans and key ethnic constituencies. But Obama’s campaign wanted to do more. Conscious of the higher expectations placed on an African-American candidate, Obama wanted to prove his ability to handle international diplomacy and the demands of being commander-in-chief. To do this, he embarked on a campaign tour of crucial European nations and the Middle East – an unusually long detour from the standard presidential campaign trail.

A key piece of the tour would be a speech in Berlin, delivered on the site of two iconic speeches from American presidential history – Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner!” speech and Reagan’s speech, “Tear down this wall.”

The speech almost ended in disaster, however. Just hours before Obama spoke, he pondered a crucial line in the speech’s ending that referred to the German word for “community of fate,” Schicksalsgemeinschaft. Double-checking with a translator, he discovered that the word had been the title of a well-known speech by Adolf Hitler!

The line was changed, just in time. And the speech – given to an enormous, cheering crowd – was a huge success. More than his actual words, which emphasized globalism over nationalism, the image of an African-American candidate addressing vast crowds on a historic stage was a powerful one.

Obama’s worldview caused tensions at home, including in his own administration.

Few presidents have had their background and outlook analyzed, and misrepresented, as much as Obama.

Obama’s worldview and background differed greatly from those of former presidents, and from those of the people – typically white men – serving in senior national security posts.

Take his upbringing. He was born in a former US colony, Hawaii, which had a diverse population and served as a link between the United States and East Asia. He also lived in Indonesia in the late 1960s, shortly after a US-sponsored coup that led to violence and hundreds of thousands of deaths – events that were barely mentioned in the United States, but were extremely formative in the region. Obama’s grandfather served during World War II and his great-uncle served in the forces that liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. As a result of these influences, Obama grew up with a view of America – of its power and position in the world – that was more complex than that of most Americans.

Obama’s nuanced view of the United States sometimes generated criticism at home. On his first foreign tour as president, he addressed the Turkish parliament. Together with his advisors, he had discussed in advance how to tackle the controversial issue of Turkish treatment of minority groups. Obama decided to reference it through the prism of America’s treatment of minority groups such as Native Americans and African Americans. In his speech, he talked of how, not long ago, his own country made it hard for someone like him to vote, let alone become president.

For Obama, this was an expression of patriotism. In his view, the capacity for improvement is what makes America exceptional. But the speech led to criticism at home – that Obama wouldn’t embrace American exceptionalism, that he wasn’t patriotic and that he was perhaps a Muslim. Among his critics, the foreign trip became known as the Obama Apology Tour.

Obama’s view of the world soon caused tensions within his own administration as well.

When Obama wanted to close Guantanamo Bay, his advisor was called in to write a speech on the subject. At Obama’s request, a draft stated that the Muslim detainees in the camp had been in a “legal black hole” for years. None, after all, had ever been convicted of any crime. But the national security advisers who reviewed the speech took issue with this language and wanted instead to say that the detainees had received more legal representation and protection than any other enemy combatants in history.

Early in his presidency, Obama made a conscious effort to talk directly to the Muslim world.

Mutual suspicion had long characterized the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world. In 2009, in a speech at Cairo University, Barack Obama tried to transform that mutual suspicion into mutual respect.

As he prepared for the speech, tensions were high. That was particularly the case for the Israelis, who had lobbied hard over its content. They feared Obama would identify the Israel-Palestine conflict as the root of all ills in the Middle East. In response to this pressure, Obama decided not to visit Israel after Cairo; he wanted to avoid any perception that the conflict was at the heart of the speech. Ironically, he would be criticized for years by supporters of the right-wing Israeli president, Benjamin Netanyahu, for this decision, despite its being made in their interest.

What came to be known as the Cairo speech clearly signaled Obama’s desire to reset relations between America and the Muslim world.

Obama used it to argue that the West needed to re-educate itself about Islam's contributions to the world, while the Muslim world should recognize the universal principles and rights of the West. In preparation for the speech, he reminisced about his time as a child in Indonesia, when girls swam outside freely, never covering their hair. That, he said, was before the Saudis started funding madrassas, or religious schools, and a less liberal Islam took hold. In the speech, he would make a bold case for women’s rights, religious tolerance and government by the rule of law.

By the time the speech was delivered, expectations on all sides were high. Obama greeted his audience with “Assalamu alaikum” – peace to you – and the room burst into cheers and applause. The speech was punctuated by applause throughout. Religious leaders cheered Obama’s defense of American Muslims’ right to wear the hijab. As he invoked democracy, activists shouted, “We love you!”

The speech was a pure expression of Obama’s outlook on the world. Hopeful, optimistic, rooted in universal values, it envisaged the world as it should be. The tale of Obama’s foreign policy would be one of constant struggle to live up to this vision.

For Obama and his young advisors, the Arab Spring was an opportunity to be a force for good in the world.

On December 17, 2010, a story – one of thousands he received every day – popped up on Obama’s advisor’s BlackBerry. A fruit seller in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, frustrated by the corruption of his government, had set himself on fire. The act had sparked a blaze of protests in the region.

Neither the advisor nor anyone else knew it at the time, but the Arab Spring had begun.

Weeks later, the protests had spread like wildfire to Egypt. The images coming out of Egypt were dramatic. Obama’s advisors watched on TV as the same security forces that had guarded their visit for the Cairo speech suppressed thousands of young men gathering in Tahrir Square.

Obama’s administration was divided over how to respond to the protests. Younger staffers like felt that this was an opportunity to support the positive vision outlined in the Cairo speech, against a backdrop of clearly repressive behavior by the Egyptian government. Defending the government felt impossible. As another communications advisor put it, while watching machete-carrying troops clear Tahrir Square, “How the f*ck am I supposed to call that restraint?”

By contrast, others – Hillary Clinton among them – were much more conservative, arguing that Hosni Mubarak’s government was stable, that protests would dissipate and that a dialogue between government and people in Egypt could be promoted. They were supported by the likes of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who cautioned Obama against supporting the Cairo protesters.

Obama’s young advisor felt this division when he drafted a statement that discussed the rights of the protestors and the need for government to pursue a “path of political change.” When it came back after review from other advisors, every word mentioning human rights and the plight of the protestors had been removed. Someone had scribbled “balance” in the margin.

In private, Obama told friends that his sympathies were with the people and, in the end, he delivered the advisor’s original draft.

Eventually, Obama decided that Mubarak’s attempts at reconciliation with his people were inadequate. The advisor listened as Obama called Mubarak and told him that the time had come for a new government.

But Mubarak held on – for a while. Older hands in the Washington establishment criticized Obama’s stance, saying his young advisors had led him to betray an old ally of the United States. But day after day, protests continued. Eventually, Mubarak fled Cairo and resigned.

This would not be the last time that Obama’s young advisors disagreed with the old guard in Washington.

Obama delivered on one of his earliest foreign-policy promises.

In 2011, in a secluded compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a tall man paced up and down in a courtyard. Unbeknownst to him, he was being watched by US intelligence analysts. As they were not yet sure of his identity, they called him “the pacer.” His true name? Osama bin Laden.

One of Obama’s first foreign-affairs promises had been to hunt down bin Laden – and now, possibly, he could deliver on it. Officials proposed a mission to capture or kill the pacer, or to take out the compound completely. But it was a high-risk situation. No one knew for certain whether the pacer really was bin Laden, with analysts putting it at a 40-60 percent chance that it was. The repercussions of a failed raid based on faulty intelligence could be severe.

Obama didn’t take the decision to go ahead lightly. In the last of what seemed like endless meetings, Obama quizzed his advisors and demonstrated a deep knowledge of the intelligence – how tall the residents of the compound were, how many people lived there, that they burned their trash rather than taking it out.

Days later, Obama gave the go-ahead for the raid. He gathered his advisors in the situation room. The president’s photographer was there to capture the scene. While the seal team helicopters flew from Afghanistan for the flight to Abbottabad, Obama retreated to the Oval Office to play cards, his way of killing time.

On May 1, watching the raid was a tense experience, especially when one of the helicopters grazed a compound wall and had to crash land. But then the phrase “Geronimo EKIA” rang out. This was the code for “bin Laden, Enemy Killed In Action.” “We got him,” Obama said.

Obama made one final decision – not to release photographs from the operation. Obama’s advisors flipped through the collection of photos taken: bin Laden’s bloody corpse; preparations for an Islamic burial, taken from a US ship in the Arabian sea; a final shot of the corpse slipping beneath the water. Obama was firm in his decision not to release them, saying that he didn’t need to put them out there as trophies.

As Obama later said in his address to the nation, justice had been done.

Normalizing relations with Cuba was an opportunity Obama to be proactive, not reactive.

During his time in Obama’s administration, Obama’s advisors had to mostly deal reactively with the messy reality of the world, from handling the legacy of George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to addressing emerging threats, such as Syria. They had little time to help proactively shape the world according to Obama’s foreign-policy goals and ideals.

So Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba were a welcome opportunity to engage in an affirmative agenda.

In 2013, Obama’s advisors started a series of secret meetings with Alejandro Castro, son of the leader Raúl Castro. Meeting in a remote, lakeside Canadian home, chosen for the sake of neutrality and discretion, Obama’s advisors and Alejandro Castro developed a constructive dialogue and relationship.

After their second meeting, there was a sign that the relationship was working. Edward Snowden, the leaker of US intelligence, was holed up in Moscow Airport, apparently hoping to fly to Venezuela, via Havana. Obama’s advisors told Castro that any assistance for Snowden would make it impossible for Obama to continue working to normalize relations with Cuba. No more was ever said. But days later, Obama’s advisors woke up to reports that Snowden was still stuck in Moscow, as Havana wouldn’t let him fly to Cuba. The Cubans, it turned out, were serious about improving their relationship with the United States.

With the help of Pope Francis, well-liked in Cuba for his South American heritage, an agreement to restore diplomatic relations between the two countries was reached.

The day before the deal was announced, Obama, joined by his advisors, made the first call to a Cuban leader since the revolution. When Raul Castro spoke, he spent half an hour listing American efforts to sabotage his government over the years. Obama’s advisors passed a note to Obama, saying he could interrupt Castro, but Obama shook his head and said that it had been a long while since Cuba had communicated with an American president and that Castro had a lot to say.

Race was a constant presence in the Obama White House, but not an easy topic for Obama to deal with.

For many Americans, Obama’s election represented a breakthrough in America’s attitude toward race. But while racism would never be far from the surface during his presidency, Obama and his team rarely addressed it directly.

Obama’s advisors regularly received intolerant messages on social media. In private, Obama sometimes displayed dark humor about the subject. Rehearsing for media Q&As, he’d sometimes give frank answers: Q: “Why do you think you have been unable to bring the US together?” A: “Well, maybe because my being president has driven some white people insane.” But in public, if asked whether racism drove the levels of opposition to his presidency, he’d say no, attributing it to other factors.

On one occasion, however, Obama’s true feelings came through. On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist called Dylan Roof entered a black church in South Carolina and killed nine people. In one day, Roof murdered more Americans than ISIS had in the last decade. Obama privately lamented that he was lost for words and said that he should maybe go to the memorial service but not say anything.

The night before the memorial, Obama stayed up late, rewriting his speech. He wanted to address racial taboos head-on – the historical racism of the confederate flag, and the present day racism of the criminal-justice system. And he wanted to root his speech in the concept of grace.

As he addressed the congregation, Obama fell into the rhythmic style often used in many black churches. He talked of the dignity of the victims, and the grace they showed in their lives. If we can tap into that grace, he said, everything could change. In an imperfect voice, he started to sing the hymn “Amazing Grace.” The congregation, filled with emotion, soon joined him.

Days later, Obama’s advisors found Obama sitting in the Oval Office, reading a letter. “Dear Mr. President,” he read aloud. The writer said that for his whole life, he had hated people based on their skin color, but since the nine people were shot, he had been thinking things over, and realized now that he had been wrong.

There was silence in the Oval Office. It’s a shame that people needed to die for that to happen, Obama said.

Obama didn’t take military action in Syria, despite his “red lines” over the use of chemical weapons.

During Obama’s time in office, the Syrian civil war emerged as one of the world’s most difficult and bloody conflicts. By 2012, the White House was concerned enough about the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria that Obama made a clear statement – any signs of the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line.” Cross it, and the United States could act.

So when reports and images of a deadly gas attack outside Damascus emerged in August 2013, there were expectations that Obama would launch military action. But he didn’t.

The international community did little to help Obama. On a call with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and the president’s most admired ally, Obama asked for her support for military action. But Merkel argued in favor of a UN Security Council resolution, despite the likelihood of the Russians blocking it. The diplomatic route would take weeks, and Obama knew that as the horror of the gas attack faded in public memory, opposition to US action would grow.

Weak support internationally was compounded by weak support in Washington. A group of Republican Congress members wrote to Obama, setting out a blunt challenge to his authority to take action. Engaging in Syria, in the absence of a direct threat to the United States, and without congressional approval, they wrote, would be a violation of the separation of powers set out in the Constitution.

During his candidacy in 2007, Obama had supported requiring congressional approval before going to war. And he decided that was the right thing to do in Syria’s case. But winning support was hard. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell refused to support action, but would later criticize Obama for not launching strikes. Congressional leader John Boehner said he would support Obama, but did nothing to help him win the votes of other Republicans.

Eventually, Obama was given an out. A conversation with Putin led to an agreement that the United States and Russia would work together to destroy chemical weapons in Syria, and the Assad regime announced that they would give up the weapons, though they’d previously denied their existence. No congressional vote ever took place.The war in Syria continued – and the United States stayed out of it.

Obama pushed through the Iran deal despite strong opposition.

When Obama took office, Iran had the knowledge and infrastructure required to develop a nuclear weapon. By 2013, it was less than twelve months away from producing the raw materials required. The need to stop Iran’s nuclear program was becoming critical.

The administration sought a diplomatic deal to halt Iran’s nuclear activity. But this required congressional approval, and there was strong opposition to a deal. The Israeli government was pushing hard, and groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee would go on to spend roughly $40 million on ads and lobbying to kill the Iran deal.

At the same time, some media outlets were playing dirty tricks. Right-wing website Breitbart published a story quoting one of Obama’s advisors as saying that even a bad Iran deal would be worth making – a completely fabricated quotation. He had in fact said that any agreement had to be good enough to last ten or 15 years. But Breitbart’s story spread on social media and was read by millions of people in a matter of hours. It was pure, and effective, fake news.

Obama’s advisors formed a unit, entirely focused on securing support for the deal in Congress. They called it the Antiwar Room, because its arguments were simple. The deal would prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Not having a deal would mean military action.

The unit worked hard to use the credentials of adversarial establishment figures against them. When Scooter Libby, former advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney and one of the key figures behind the Iraq war, attacked the proposed deal, the unit argued that the very same people who’d taken America to war with Iraq now wanted war with Iran.

Gradually, things turned in favor of the White House. Leading physicists supported the deal. The former head of Mossad, the Israeli security service, supported it. Iranian dissidents confirmed that they were in favor too.

The day Obama’s advisors secured their final, crucial votes, arch-neocon Dick Cheney gave a speech. The Antiwar room watched with pleasure as Cheney reinforced their argument that proponents of the Iraq War now wanted war with Iran until antiwar protesters disrupted the speech. Obama grinned. “That was actually kind of fun,” he said.

Obama’s administration was on the losing side of the information wars.

Throughout Obama’s presidency, Obama’s advisors witnessed the spread of increasingly shameless misinformation. Fake news was becoming a serious issue.

Obama’s advisors saw Russia invest heavily in disinformation, and the United States was not well placed to fight back.

After a Malaysia Airlines Flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over Ukraine, in 2014, a Russian disinformation campaign kicked in. Russia’s Foreign Ministry held a press conference, proposing multiple, contradictory theories. A Ukrainian aircraft had done it, they suggested, or maybe it was Ukrainian surface-to-air missiles. The theories were repeated in Russian state-run media and flooded social media. Russian media outlets even invented fake quotations, attributed to a US state department spokesperson. The lying was relentless and deliberate.

Obama’s advisors had few means to fight back. His Russian counterparts had control of TV stations and an army of social media warriors who were encouraged to lie. Obama’s advisors had a five-person press office and a Twitter account, and they were prohibited by law from giving editorial direction to government broadcasting.

In 2014, Obama’s advisors examined what – hypothetically – could be done to replicate something like the Russian state-media channel, RT. The project was quickly abandoned when Obama laughingly pointed out that the Republicans would never sign off on a well-funded Obama propaganda channel.

Political attempts to counter Russian disinformation were also flawed. After it had become clear that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Convention and were meddling in the presidential election, the White House tried to secure a robust, bipartisan statement condemning the acts. But the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, refused to sign, in an act that Democrats regarded as unpatriotic.

Obama was criticized for not speaking out more strongly. But, as he commented privately, people reading anti-Clinton propaganda were unlikely to take his warnings seriously. His view? Russians had found a soft spot in American democracy.

Obama and his advisors were surprised by Donald Trump’s victory.

A few days before the 2016 election, Obama and his advisors were sitting in the presidential helicopter, en route to the White House after a campaign visit, when they received an email from Clinton’s campaign. The day before the election, it asked, could Obama go to Michigan?

“Michigan?” Obama said, shocked. He had taken Michigan by ten points in 2012. This was not a good sign.

Later, Obama found it hard to understand the election result. Sitting in the Beast, the presidential state car, cruising through the streets of Lima on one of his last foreign visits, Obama said he’d been surprised by the result, given the positive economic indicators – low unemployment, cheap gas prices, many more Americans covered by health insurance. Obama asked, “What if we were wrong?” He wondered out loud whether liberals had lost sight of the importance of identity – of the fact that many Americans were skeptical of the kind of metropolitan globalism liberals promoted.

Obama’s advisors had the feeling that they should have anticipated the result. On reflection, they thought, Obama’s own campaign message against Clinton, eight years earlier, had been similar to Trump’s – minus the misogyny. Both had argued that she was inextricably part of an establishment that couldn’t be relied upon to bring about real change. They also felt that Trump’s win was the result of the increasing irrelevance of facts in right-wing politics – a disturbing state of affairs that he and the Obama administration had had to tackle while in office. A solid majority of Republicans still refused to believe that Obama was actually born in the United States. In these circumstances, perhaps Trump’s victory shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Obama was left even more astonished after meeting with Trump. After a long and friendly meeting with the President-elect, a week after the election, Obama was stupefied. He said that Trump had regularly turned the conversation back to the size of his, and Obama’s, campaign rallies, saying that both men could draw a crowd far larger than Hillary could. He voiced openness to Obama’s views on health care, on Iran and immigration, but almost prided himself on avoiding taking a clear position on any policy at all.

Obama’s final advice on dealing with Trump? “Find some high ground,” he said, “and hunker down.”

President Obama attempted to advance ideals – ideals of universal rights, the benefits of strong, democratic institutions, and of openness and respect. He wasn’t always successful in doing so and regularly had to deal with the hard realities of our imperfect world, for example when trying to intervene in the war in Syria or fight Russian disinformation.

#Obama’s Presidency

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viralhottopics · 7 years

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That Hawaii boycott will probably backfire like every other campaign

A lovely shot of beautiful, boycotted Hawaii.

Image: Shutterstock / SergiyN

In addition to bright red hats and Vladimir Putin, it seems Trump supporters also have an affinity for boycotting things but not just any things, very good things. The BEST things.

They’ve hated on popular broadway plays, movie franchises and beverages. And in the most recent move, Trump supporters are boycotting America’s fiftieth state, Hawaii.

Whomp whomp whomp.

SEE ALSO: Obama can’t even go on vacation without starting a conspiracy theory

The ridiculous desire to snub the Aloha State comes after a Hawaii federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s latest attempt at a travel ban on Wednesday night.

On Thursday morning, another judge in Maryland also shut down the proposal, but by then Trump supporters had already dumped the blame on Hawaii and established their dramatic #BoycottHawaii hashtag.

Those in favor of boycotting the beautiful state were so pissed about Trump’s second travel ban being shut down that they began cancelling their vacations and tweeting angrily.

#BoycottHawaii Hawaii, what do you know? You were 5,000 miles from 9/11. You run your little world and let the grownups run the mainland. http://pic.twitter.com/jDySlmxevp

Philip Schuyler (@FiveRights) March 16, 2017

#BoycottHawaii I was taking my kids & Grandkids to Hawaii. We just cancelled @gohawaii your Judge threatens our safety.

*Wendy* (@wendyvoss) March 16, 2017

Haven’t been to Hawaii in years and now will not go again. #BoycottHawaii and pull federal funding.

Debbie martin (@Debbiem51488829) March 16, 2017

Hawaii, last time I ever think of going there.. #boycottHawaii

Deep State Destroyer (@GodspeedTrumps) March 16, 2017

@TEN_GOP So sad, taking Hawaii off my travel plans, #boycottHawaii

Edsf100 (@eds56f100) March 15, 2017

However, many others felt that, like most Trump supporter boycotts, this was pretty dumb because Hawaii is GREAT. People shared lovely pictures of the state on Twitter and proudly declared they would not boycott Hawaii and its beautiful beaches, culture and hospitality.

May the #BoycottHawaii campaign go as successfully as the past boycotts against Apple, Twitter, Starbucks, spellcheck…

Gabe Ortz (@TUSK81) March 16, 2017

HAHAHAHA MORE FOR ME THEN LMAOOOOO #BoycottHawaii http://pic.twitter.com/dSoLQmfYmS

victoria (@victoriaaze_) March 16, 2017

Anyone who wants to #BoycottHawaii can slide those plane tickets right over here. Hotel reservations, too.

P’Challa MacKenzie (@pfunk1130) March 16, 2017

2 immediate thoughts after seeing #BoycottHawaii

1) Book next vacation for Hawaii 2) I hope my state pisses off the trump supporters

Little Finger (@realDonaIdRump) March 16, 2017

Hawaii was already paradise. Now if deplorables #BoycottHawaii, it will be a heaven on earth.

McSpocky (@mcspocky) March 16, 2017

This latest boycott got us thinking about just how much Trump supporters LOVE to boycott wonderful, popular things. Like, can’t we just have nice things?

Here are some other outrageously great things Trump supporters have rallied against:

Star Wars

We’re not even kidding. In December 2016, prior to the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Jack Posobiac, special projects director for a group called Citizens for Trump, also went on a Twitter rant claiming that Star Wars writers re-wrote several scenes from Rogue One to add anti-Trump scenes. Controversy sparked again and the hashtag #DumpStarWars emerged.

Posobiac streamed an 18-minute Periscope elaborating on his conspiracy theory, further condemning the franchise and urging fellow Trump supporters to join him in rebellion.

LIVE on #Periscope: Star Wars Writers Say Rogue One is Anti Trump Film #DumpStarWars https://t.co/1dsdU3eDRA

Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) December 8, 2016

Outcome: In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Disney CEO Bob Iger later reacted to the alt-right boycott and anti-Trump accusations, explaining, “I have no reaction to [this] story at all. Frankly, this is a film that the world should enjoy. It is not a film that is, in any way, a political film. There are no political statements in it, at all,” he said.

That settled that, and the movie made over $1 billion at the box office globally, so this boycott was a fail.

Hamilton

Next up, everybody’s favorite broadway play came under fire after Vice President Pence went to see the hit play back in November 2016 and was met by a theater of boos upon entering.

Tonight, VP-Elect Mike Pence attended #HamiltonBway. After the show, @BrandonVDixon delivered the following statement on behalf of the show. http://pic.twitter.com/Jsg9Q1pMZs

Hamilton (@HamiltonMusical) November 19, 2016

Though the cast comments directed atPence were extremely peaceful and the VP made a statement explaining he was not offended by the incident, Donald Trump was pissed. The president hopped online to unleash the wrath of his Twitter fingers against the production and its “harassing” cast, demanding an apology.

Our wonderful future V.P. Mike Pence was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing.This should not happen!

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2016

Trump supporters were also appalled by the cast members’ actions, and in solidarity with the Tweeter-in-Chief, began to boycott the “overrated” production.

Dear Mr. Pence

Thank you visiting. Please sit there so we can lecture you. We won’t give you chance to respond.

Unfair

#boycotthamilton

My Name Devon (@mrmcoupe1) November 19, 2016

Completely inappropriate for the cast of #Hamilton to address Mike Pence like this. Not the time or the place. Time to #BoycottHamilton https://t.co/5CHq57ehVk

The GOP Report (@TheGOPReport) November 19, 2016

Outcome: Just to be clearHamilton is still wildly popular, ridiculously successful, and according to The New York Times, the boycott had the opposite effect on sales. In fact, following the attempt to deter people from the production, Hamilton set a Broadway record for the most money made in a single week by a broadway show. Good job, Trump supporters.

Budweiser

Instead of fighting over football in the 2016 Super Bowl, Trump supporters decided to keep the arguments political by targeting Budweiser with yet another boycott.

After Budweiser aired a pro-immigrant Super Bowl ad celebrating its parent company’s German-born co-founder Adolphus Busch immigrating to the United States in the early 1850s, the hashtag #boycottbudwieser began trending on Twitter.

Since the advertisement followed the controversial immigration ban Trump released in January, Trump supporters were quick to connect the two and flock to Twitter to bash the brand. Despite the company denying the ad was related to Trump’s immigration stance, the #boycottbudweiser tweets rolled on in, along with #boycottbudwiser, which totally misspells the brand. LOL.

I don’t drink at all, but I suggest those who do to stop buying beer from a company that attacks you for being patriotic. #boycottbudwiser

Angelo John Gage (@AngeloJohnGage) February 6, 2017

Last night’s Orwellian Super Bowl advertising should strike fear into the hearts of freedom-loving Americans.#SB51 #boycottbudwiser

Patrick Henry (@FightNowAmerica) February 6, 2017

Outcome: The hashtag was spelled incorrectly, so automatic fail, but aside from that Budweiser is still in business and was ranked #25 on Forbes “World’s Most Valuable Brands” of 2016. Not too shabby.

Moral of the story:

The boycotts don’t seem to be having the desired effect here, Trump supporters. So why not quit hating and take a weekend off to go see Hamilton, binge-watch the Star Wars movies and take a relaxing vacation to Hawaii to sip a nice cold Budweiser. Or leave them all to the rest of us bwahahaha.

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